When Ghassan had come to bury his first wife in Burj el-Shamali, Ni’ma attended the burial. It was incredibly unfair, Ni’ma thought when she saw Ghassan’s wife being lowered into the ground, to escape these twisted alleyways and the bombs from every direction; to make it all the way to America, only to die anyway.

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.