Graciela Ana Fernandez remembers everything, including her birth. She can still see the honey-colored walls of the sticky clinic birth room in Mexico where a dozen women in various stages of labor formed an L shape with their cots. Some shared the company with their own mothers clutching their hands. A few had no one but an indigenous nurse to trace the length of their brows with an ice cube.
It was in that new-sprung, flirty light that Joh saw her, yellow skirt swinging around her brown muscled calves and bouncing up the back of her thighs as she jumped hopscotch. The sight of her hit him like his first drunk—a sweet, surprising, full-body flush—just like the half a bottle of communion wine, stolen when he was twelve years old. He forgot the near-empty feed troughs and that Namon, his older brother, had warned him what would happen if the hogs broke free again. He tooted the horn, a bright frivolous sound, and steered the truck to the side of the road.
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