The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. It was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. Again and again, I watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” when they had done nothing wrong. I have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip—only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

And yet it’s not only so in the nail salon, Ma. In those tobacco fields, too, we said it. “Lo siento,” Manny would utter as he walked across Mr. Buford’s field of vision. “Lo siento,” Rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where Buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. “Lo siento,” I said to the boss after missing a day when Lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the “evidence.” “Lo siento,” we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. “Lo siento, se?or,” each of us said as we walked past the truck with Buford inside blasting Hank Williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of Ronald Reagan taped to the dash. How the day after, we began work not with “Good morning” but with “Lo siento.” The phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.

I think of those men who sweated, who joked and sang beside me in the endless tobacco. How George was one grand away, about two months of work, from buying his mother a house outside Guadalajara. How Brandon was going to send his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, to university in Mexico City to be a dentist, like she always wanted. How after one more season, Manny would be back by the seaside village in El Salvador, running his fingers over the scar on his mother’s collarbone where a tumor would’ve just been removed using the pay he received removing tobacco from the Connecticut soil. How he’d buy, with his remaining savings, a boat and try his luck fishing for marlins. Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.

The day’s work done, my white tank top so stained with dirt and sweat, it was like I wore no shirt at all as I walked my bike out of the barn. Fingers sticky and raw over the handlebars, I plunged my silver Huffy forward, down the dust-blown street, past the vast and now empty distances where the crop once stood, the sun burning low above the tree line. And I heard them behind me, their voices distinct as channels on a radio. “?Hasta ma?ana, Chinito!” “?Adios, muchacho!” And I knew which men the voices belonged to. Without looking, I could tell Manny was waving, like he did each day, his three-and-a-half-fingered hand black against the last light.

What I wanted to say to them, as I rode away, and also the next morning, all mornings, is what I want to say to you now: Sorry. Sorry that it would be so long before they would see their loved ones, that some might not make it back across the desert border alive, taken by dehydration and exposure or murdered by drug cartels or the right-wing crack militia in Texas and Arizona. Lo siento, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. Because by then my sorry had already changed into something else. It had become a portion of my own name—unutterable without fraudulence.

Which is why, when the boy came to me one afternoon, the boy who would change what I knew of summer, how deep a season opens when you refuse to follow the days out of it, I said “Sorry.” The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work—want. That August, in the fields, it was he who came into my vision. Near day’s end, I felt another worker beside me but, caught in the rhythm of the harvest, couldn’t stop to consider him. We picked for about ten minutes, his presence intensifying on the periphery until he stepped in front of me as I reached to lift a wilted stalk. I looked up at him, a head taller, his finely boned face dirt-streaked under a metal army helmet, tipped slightly backward, as if he had just walked out from one of Lan’s stories and into my hour, somehow smiling.

“Trevor,” he said, straightening up. “I’m Trevor.” I would know only later that he was Buford’s grandson, working the farm to get away from his vodka-soaked old man. And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.

That first day after meeting him in the field, I found Trevor again in the barn. The dusked light had washed the interior with a bluish glow. Outside, the workers’ axes clinked against their belt straps as they climbed the dirt knoll back to their Airstreams by the edge of the wood. The air was cool, tinged with chlorophyll from the fresh-cut tobacco now suspended from the beams above us, some still dripping, making tiny dust swirls along the barn floor.

I don’t know why I lingered at my bike, taking time checking the spokes. Trevor sat on a bench along the wall, chugging a neon-yellow Gatorade.

There was something about the way he looked when lost in thought, his brow pinched under squinted eyes, giving his boyish face the harsh, hurt expression of someone watching his favorite dog being put down too soon. The way his mud-streaked and dusty edges juxtaposed against that rounded mouth and pert lips sealed into a flushed, feminine pout. Who are you, I thought to myself as I worked the brakes.

What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place. The way he watched me back there in the field, when we worked briefly, side by side, our arms brushing against each other as the plants racked themselves in a green blur before me, his eyes lingering, then flitting away when I caught them. I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped. “My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?”

Trevor and I talked about the fields as the light slipped from the barn, how much more there was to be done, how the crop was for cigars exported to Africa and East Asia, where smoking was still popular and where anything that came from America still had an aura of promise to it. But truth was, Trevor said, the crop was low-grade, the burn bitter in the throat, sour.

“This crop ain’t even legit,” he said. His voice echoed up the rafters. I peered over my shoulder, catching him. “Wormholes all over ’em. We got two good years, maybe three, and then—” He ran his hand, like a blade, over his Adam’s apple. “It’s a wrap.” He grew silent. I could feel his eyes as I returned to my bike. And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of.

As I laid my chain on the fulcrum, I could hear the swooshing of the Gatorade in the bottle, then the bottle being set down on the bench. After a moment, he said, real quiet, “I fucking hate my dad.”

Up until then I didn’t think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.

“I hate my dad, too,” I said to my hands, now still and dark with chain grease.

When I turned around Trevor was smiling up at the ceiling. He saw me, hopped off the ledge, and walked over, the smile fading into something else as he pulled the army helmet over his eyes. The black Adidas logo on his white T-shirt shifted as he approached. I was a freshman that summer, and Trevor was already a junior. Although barely visible in the sun, here in the barn, and coming closer, his thin mustache deepened, a blondish streak dark with sweat. And above that, his eyes: their grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky. It seemed the boy was always looking at a plane wrecking itself midair. That’s what I saw that first day. And although I knew that nothing behind me was on fire, I turned back anyway and saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields.

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