THERE WERE FIVE OF them. Three men, a woman, and an infant, huddled at the side of the adobe. Chris watched them from the window of the master bedroom, where he was painting the walls the soft salmon color Carmen favored for most of the house. He’d heard a noise from outside, and when he’d turned off the light, he’d seen them filling empty plastic milk jugs with water from the hose. The undocumented workers from the canyon.
The men were small and stripped to the waist. Their bodies, caught partially in the light coming from the back of the house, were tight, the muscles well-defined. The woman was a little heavier; the child she held was wrapped in a blanket or towel—from this distance, Chris couldn’t tell which.
If they were speaking to one another, he couldn’t hear them. He’d closed all the windows in the adobe because soot from a new fire on the other side of the canyon was sifting through the screens, and he was afraid it would layer itself on the freshly painted walls. Besides, he was tired—very tired—of the smell of smoke.
So Carmen still did this, he thought, still let the workers living in the canyon use her water. No wonder her bill was astronomical.
It was rare to see women and children among the men. Usually it was the men who risked the journey north across the border, who did the hard labor and sent the money home to their families.
One of the men held the hose for the woman as she leaned over to wash her long, dark hair with a bar of soap. When she straightened up again, she unwrapped the child and soaped his small body, while the man poured water over him from a plastic jug. The child howled. It was cool outside, and Chris could imagine how the cold tap water felt on the baby’s skin. He thought of hurrying downstairs to fill a basin with warm water, but he knew what Carmen would say: “I never go out to talk with them anymore. They can pretend it isn’t charity if they don’t have to see me. They can keep their pride.”
Carmen could give and ask nothing in return. It was a side of her she allowed so few people to see, a side of her he didn’t want to forget existed.
As the woman dried her baby, the man plucked a prairie blanket flower from the earth and handed it to her. With a pang of loneliness, Chris walked away from the window and turned on the light again. He needed to finish his painting and be out of the adobe before Carmen arrived home.