Mom shifts in her seat a little bit, and looks down at her hands. “We make sacrifices, you see,” she says to her hands. I wait for her to finish the thought with “For the Lord,” as she usually does when she’s telling me why I can’t do something I want to do. But she doesn’t say anything else, just lets that sit all by itself.

He thought Phyllicia was too racially sensitive, and called her paranoid on more than one occasion. She says he was self-hating and ignorant. After he graduated from business school – long after they had broken up –  he moved to South Africa to pursue economic opportunities in emerging markets (“the way maggots pursue feeding opportunities in dead cows” Phyllicia says) and married a very light skinned woman there, a local beauty queen working as a manicurist.

Somewhere in Angleton, I’m waist deep in a pond, looking for a dying giant water lily though I can barely see two feet in front of me. 

At nine feet wide, the lily made the front page of our local paper in Harlingen, a small, neglected Texas town five hours away from Angleton. It was a change from reading about the Matas’ feud with Los Reyes Magos cartel and the fire sales of farms across the Rio Grande Valley. For a town going nowhere, we cultivate a lot of news.

The four of us live on the rooftop, in the azotea of the building where we work. It's a four story building in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. There are four families in the building: a family on each floor, a maid for each apartment. One María for each family.

The moment that Marianne, no-last-name, the Grand Dame of Venus Day Spa & Bistro, laid her salve-softened 77 year old hands on her feet, Maya cringed inwardly. Her feet, accustomed to being bare unless absolutely necessary, were never going to respond to the kind of ministrations such hands could provide. This was followed by irritation: why did Marianne have to touch her feet in the first place? She had signed up for a spa facial, not a foot massage.

When my mother found out I was going to marry you she said, “A man like that, you’ll always end up sleeping at his back. He’ll never sleep at yours.” And I was ashamed, because how did she know it was already like that with you, that that was how we slept every night together? Our first night lying side by side, you slept with your smiling, open face to the wall and I was the one who curved to your back, stuck too close for comfort.