For the first time in her life, Lacy Adams paid attention in church. There was nothing special about the service that Sunday. Her dad sat beside her, blank-faced as usual. Junior doodled in the hymnal. Her mom fanned the wet Gulf air blowing in from Harlingen, while the familiar calls of green jays floated through the open windows. But that morning Lacy felt different. She had just learned the scientific method at the end of the school year, and her teacher said it applied to everything but the Bible. And ever since then Lacy had looked at the world with narrower eyes, tingling with a sense that asking questions, using her mind, could unlock mysteries around her. She sat forward in the pew and listened. The pastor told the story of beautiful Queen Esther, a Jew in a hostile land who loved her people and saved them from slaughter when she revealed herself as one of them. And now, today, the pastor preached, let us pray for the freedom-seeking people behind the Iron Curtain, under the soulless Soviet grip, who have to hide themselves like Esther to survive.
After the sermon, the congregation rose to pass the peace. Lacy and Junior hopped to their feet, but they could never reach any hands to shake. The Adams family had a pew reserved for them, front and center, and no one sat in the pew behind them—a distance the farmers kept out of respect, Lacy knew, to give her family more of God’s light. She watched her parents lean over the empty pew, but when her dad stuck out his hand and said, “Peace be with you,” a farmer with a thick beard just stared at it, keeping his own calloused hands on his belt buckle. “Not while you’re still around,” the man growled, loud enough to hear, and turned his back to them.
Her dad didn’t blink. He turned to his wife and shook her hand, and then Lacy’s and Junior’s for good measure. The service resumed. Lacy could tell that her mom was seething, but she didn’t speak as they filed outside and piled in the red Buick and drove home. She held her tongue while she warmed the pot roast and set the table. She led them sharply through grace. “The nerve,” she huffed when they started eating. “The disrespect, inside First Baptist? After all we’ve done for them, to refuse to shake your—”
Lacy’s dad lifted his hand for silence. The family watched him sweep the last bites off his plate and run the good linen napkin over his mouth. “They’re blowing off steam, Mary,” he said, standing up. “Two days and it’ll be over.” He had changed before the meal, out of the Sunday suit and snakeskins he got in Houston, into dungarees and work boots. He settled his Stetson on his massive gray head and went out the door without a look or goodbye.
“Pure white trash,” she resumed, talking to no one in particular like she did at the table and in the car and whenever Lacy’s dad wasn’t around. She smoothed the blond hair she wore in a fluffed-up Grace Kelly style. “None of those fools had to sell to your father. Drowning in debt, and he bailed them out and gave them jobs. Couldn’t grow corn in Eden. Do you see your daddy taking a day of rest? Ten years he’s worked on the Plan—the feedlots, cattle, sticking his neck out—to change how America eats. Pure disrespect.”
“Can I have some more—” Lacy began.
“No, ma’am.” Her mom slid the bowl of potatoes out of reach. “You’ve got to reduce to look good for your Girl Scouts pageant. Junior, you want seconds?”
“Yes, please,” he said, and shot a wary look at Lacy.
“Is your troop ready?” her mom asked, serving Junior a heap of mashed potatoes. “Y’all just got the one more singing practice, right?”
“I guess,” Lacy said impatiently. “But first I have to turn in my family tree to get my Family History Badge. It’s due tomorrow.” She hated Girl Scouts. It wasn’t her choice to go, and she never wanted to mix with the uppity town girls. But anything Lacy did she did full steam, and for two weeks her mom had put her off, saying some other day they’d do her tree. “I can go get it,” she said.
“Manners, Lacy, not at the table.” Her mom sighed irritably and stabbed her pot roast. “I already told you about my family. I was orphaned, working in a washateria in Laredo when your daddy came in on a business trip with a tear in his shirt, and I had a needle and thread. Then we got married and had y’all two blessings. The end.”
“You were born in Laredo?” Lacy persisted. “I need your birth date, and your mom and dad’s names, birthplaces, and birth dates, to finish—”
“Write ‘deceased,’” her mom snapped. “Junior, how was Boy Scouts this week?”
“OK,” he chirped. “Wanna see what we did?” He wiped his face on his sleeve and jogged to the foyer. Junior was as cute as a puppy, with blond hair as light as their mom’s, not like the black mop on Lacy’s head. He charged into the room, doing an elaborate fall-roll-and-point maneuver, and aimed a pretend gun at their mom. “Kill the wetbacks!” he shrieked, spraying the table with rounds of fire.
“Junior!” their mom scolded. “Get up. Don’t say that word again.”
“What word?” he asked, rising in confusion.
“Wetback. It’s ugly. And no running in the house.”
“But that’s the name of the operation,” he objected. “Operation Wetback. We met the Border Patrol in Boy Scouts. They’re doing sweeps now. They started in Brownsville. Now McAllen, up the river to Laredo, all the way to El Paso.”
“And we like Ike,” their mom pronounced. “We always support our president. But.” She straightened her place mat. “Not all Mexicans are bad people, Junior. Some of them don’t want to blend in and be American, speak English or eat our foods—”
“Animals,” he barked. “That’s what the patrol man said. Live like pigs and send our money to Mexico, and we gotta get rid of them. He asked the Scouts what we think. I said build a big wall. With swords on top to stick them if they get all the way up.”
“Get rid of them?” Lacy said, slightly disturbed but masking it in the superior tone she had to take with her brother sometimes. “Listen, nosebleed, your patrol guy is talking about us.”
“Excuse me?” her mom blurted. “What on earth are you talking about, Lacy?”
“Our farm?” she said, suddenly filled with doubt at her mom’s tone. “Daddy’s business. His workers are Mexican, aren’t they? Like Xavier, he’s from—”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Yes, a good number of them.”
“Because one of the town girls,” Lacy muttered. “In Girl Scouts.” She bit her lip, unsure if she should continue but needing to test hypotheses. “She said Dad’s filling up the county with cow shit and Mexicans. And ruining everything.”
Her mom watched her and then leaned forward and asked, in a not-friendly voice, “Do you know what a pioneer is, Lacy? The man with the polio vaccine? Henry Ford? Thanks to your dad we’re going to be rich. We are rich.” She put a finger to her lips like they had a secret. Her eyes blazed. “But this week we’ll be really rich. Junior, you, me—the three of us. And we’ll move into town where we belong.”
“Mommy?” Junior asked softly. “Is the Border Patrol coming here, for our men?”
Lacy watched her mom’s knuckles whiten as she squeezed the napkin in her fist. “Don’t worry about that,” she replied. “Your daddy’s got it all worked out.”
Lacy’s mom had been talking about the Plan for as long as she could remember. Her mom kept to herself and didn’t have friends, so when her dad was away, which was most of the time, Mary Adams talked to her kids in a low, steady stream, like a faucet left a little on. For years their dad had been buying up the farms near McAllen and clearing the crops and trees to build the feedlots. He shipped cattle in, fattened them, and sent them to slaughter, and after ten years he hit the impossible number: a hundred thousand heads, with the facilities and staff to sustain them. He met his target—her mom always talked targets during meals—and could sell to a company in Chicago, and they were finally leaving this stink patch for a big brick house her mom had picked out. Because that’s how America works, she would say as she cooked or folded laundry—you get rich and stay that way, and your kids stay that way, your grandkids, on down the line.
Lacy had nothing against McAllen, with its grand paved streets and palm trees reaching for the sky. But she and Junior didn’t share their mom’s excitement, or really believe they were moving, because the farm was what they knew and it was fun. As soon as Junior could walk, he and Lacy played together. After school and summers they spent side by side, climbing the fence posts to watch the cattle storm the troughs at feeding time. Or they’d play their favorite game, seeing who could get closer to the bank of the manure pond before one of them gagged and ran away, coughing and giggling in a sick ecstasy. On clear days they climbed the only tree for miles, a cottonwood beside their house, and surveyed the dirt squares stretching to the horizon, full of cattle barely moving as the sun beat down. Lacy told Junior what she learned at school as they perched on a branch, photosynthesis or the Boston Tea Party, so he’d be the first to know in his class. They were best friends.
But the last few months, something seemed to change between them. Lacy knew for sure on the day they saw a calf being born. One morning at the end of the school year, their dad woke them up and they ran to the barn to watch. For an hour its head peeked out of its mom’s rump, waiting as the sun rose, opening its mouth silently like it didn’t know the words yet. The cow lowed as her calf’s legs cleared and it fell into a bright new world. It staggered to its feet. Lacy held her breath, scared to interrupt the sacred scene. “How long till it’s fat enough to kill?” her brother asked.
“Junior!” she cried. Because it was the last prick of what had been building for a while. From the moment their mom signed them up for Scouts, her brother started acting like another person. He didn’t want to play with her much, and when they did, all he talked about were boys in his troop or killing things. Or he’d lecture Lacy, fresh out of first grade while she was through fourth, and when he got things wrong and she corrected him he’d cut her off with the same line—“You’re a girl”—and ride away on his bike or shut his bedroom door. And that was how things stood between them soon after, on the Sunday Junior fired at their mom in the dining room.
Lacy couldn’t put her finger on it, but something didn’t sit right when their mom said stuff got worked out with the Border Patrol. Lacy didn’t make a habit of questioning her parents. She loved them. Her mom was the prettiest lady she knew, with a big twang and bigger smile—a real Texan woman, a teacher told her once. And her dad had muscles, even though he was old, and a face as strong as Mount Rushmore in her history book. But there was a look in her mom’s eyes at lunch that Sunday, a sound in her voice, that made Lacy excuse herself from the table to go find Xavier.
Next to the barn she saw the truck he used to shuttle workers from Chilitown to the feedlots every morning and back again at night. Xavier came out of the barn carrying a couple of cattle prods. Lacy knew she’d find him. He was her dad’s right-hand man, and if one of them was working, so was the other. Xavier was a good guy, her dad said, and there was something Lacy trusted in his mellow voice and the pressed dungarees and clean white shirt he always wore. He smiled as she approached, his hair so black in the sun it shined a little blue.
“Muchacha.” He dropped the prods in the flatbed. “Want to drive the big truck?”
“Hi, muchacho,” Lacy replied. Junior’s recent indifference to Lacy had left her with more time on her hands, and lately she spent it tracking down Xavier and talking to him about Mexico and his wife and daughter there.
“Your dad’s not here,” Xavier said. “He drive out to the west lots.”
“I’m not looking for him.” Lacy climbed in the flatbed and watched him load tools.
“The Border Patrol came to Junior’s Boy Scouts,” she announced abruptly. “They’re rounding up Mexicans. But Mom said Dad worked it out.”
“Yes.”
“He did?” Lacy asked.
“He get us all papers.” Xavier stopped working. “Why? Why the sad face?”
“Nothing. My mom seemed…” Lacy didn’t put words to many feelings. They weren’t those kinds of people. “Weird,” she mumbled. “What papers?”
“Papers. To say the government knows you and you can be in America.”
“Why does the government have to know you?” she asked.
Xavier shrugged and loaded the truck.
“Why did they leave Mexico?” Lacy asked.
“Who?”
“The men in Chilitown. The workers.”
“Because.” He sighed. “Not everybody can live where he’s born.”
“How did they get here?”
“In trucks. Or walk and follow a star.”
Lacy looked down at the dress her mom made her wear, a stupid frilly thing from a shop in McAllen, and thought this over. “I was born here, but we’re moving to town.”
“Yes,” Xavier said. “I know.”
“Can I come see you after? You’re not moving, are you?”
“No. Your dad’s buyer, they buy the men and equipment, everything, so we stay. Your dad needs all the men now. He hires a one-leg man if he can hop here.” Xavier stopped and smiled at her. “And you can come visit.”
“Is that why you left Mexico? You couldn’t live where you were born?”
“I come to work. So I send money back and Xiomara can go to school like you.”
Xiomara was Xavier’s daughter, a year older than Lacy. She had long black hair and was good with horses. Her name meant “warrior,” Xavier told her once—“a tough girl like you.”
Lacy was still thinking about papers as she lay in bed that night, watching the moon cast wavy shadows of cottonwood branches on her wall. The details were murky, but she figured her dad was a hero for getting papers for his workers, and she drifted to sleep. In the morning when she went down to breakfast, the table was set but Junior ate alone. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.
“Attic,” he said, his mouth full of toast. “Packing. He works her like an ox.”
“Who does?” Lacy asked, pouring a bowl of corn flakes.
“Daddy. It’s not right. That’s what Mommy said. Don’t tell Daddy.”
Lacy contemplated this as she ate her cereal. Their mom complained sometimes about not having a maid. Lacy asked her once why they didn’t, if they were rich, and she gave Lacy a surprised look and said their dad was thrifty and everyone had a job to do. The words stuck in Lacy’s mind, connected vaguely to how her parents never gave each other love kisses like the pastor and his wife did, and how their dad was hard on their mom. He never hit her. But he put his fork down when he didn’t like dinner, and said a bad job was no job at all, and waited until she scuffled like a whipped horse back to the kitchen to cook him something new.
Lacy heard her dad coming downstairs as she slurped the milk from her bowl. He wore his Sunday suit and snakeskins on a Monday. He sat at the head of the table, poured coffee, and sipped. “Where’s your mother?” he asked Lacy.
A crash from above startled Lacy and Junior in their chairs. Their dad looked at the ceiling. She heard her mom’s footsteps on the half flight, then the second floor, and as she descended to the foyer Lacy could make out her words. “Too cheap for hired help,” she grumbled, “like a slave, the blood from my—” She caught herself when she turned into the dining room, meeting their dad’s gaze, and looked down. “I thought you were gone.”
“Heading out,” he said and stood up. “How’s the packing?”
“Dusty. I think I’m getting sick.”
“I heard a crash,” he said sternly. “The house goes with the sale.”
“I know that, James. That’s why I’m packing. Lacy, put on your uniform. We’re leaving for Scouts in ten minutes.”
“I’ll drop her,” he said, putting on his hat. “Get back to packing. Pork chops tonight. And when you’re done in the attic, iron my blue shirt for the closing tomorrow.” He walked into the foyer and stopped with his back to them. “I give orders once,” he said. “You hear?”
Lacy and Junior locked eyes as the silence thickened and grew unbearable, until their mom wiped her hands on her apron and said quietly, “I heard you.”
Lacy could count on one hand the times she’d been in her dad’s giant black truck. The smell of corn feed wafted from the flatbed as they bounced down the dirt road to the highway connection. Tools jangled on the floor. The seats weren’t soft like her mom’s Buick, and Lacy felt a mixture of nausea and awe at the whole situation.
“Where’s y’all’s practice at?” her dad asked.
“McAllen High. Where the pageant is tomorrow. Are you coming?”
“I got a meeting in the morning, and then we’re all coming. Free lunch, right?”
“It’s a lunch pageant,” Lacy said. “Where are you going now?”
“To meet with our congressman. You know what Congress is?”
“The Senate and House of Representatives.” Lacy considered his errand. “Does our congressman give papers?”
“Do what?”
“For our workers. Does he give the papers to protect them from the patrol?”
Her dad gripped the steering wheel. “He helps out. He wants me to be happy and keep all the men I want to keep here. Do what’s best for the area. When I sell the business tomorrow, the buyer’s building a plant outside town so we don’t have to ship the cattle away for slaughter. That’s more money for the county and more jobs for everybody. Texans, Mexicans, whoever.”
“Why does the president want them out?”
“There’s no one mind on the Mexicans.” He shook his head. “Senator Johnson sees it like I do. If folks want to work for my price, do what I say, no backtalk, what do I care if they’re from Mexico or Timbuktu?”
Lacy’s chest tightened. She hadn’t finished her family tree. She yanked it from her knapsack and spread it out on the dashboard. “What year and place were you born?” she fired off. “And your parents. It’s for my badge.”
“Nineteen oh one, Galveston. Clarence and Eugenia Adams, Angleton, 1874 and ’75.”
“Are they alive?”
“I expect not. They gave me to a home. Dirt farmers. Couldn’t feed us all.” He turned to see a furry corpse on the side of the highway, one of the cougars that had been popping up lately. “Solitary beast,” he muttered. “Roadkill now. The dead feed the living,” he explained. “We feed cattle, cattle feed people. A cycle. I worked my way from an orphanage to A&M.” He stole a look at Lacy. “They didn’t let girls into the ag school in those days.”
“And Mom?” she asked. “She was born in Laredo?”
He yanked the stick shift. The truck shot forward. “That’s where we met. Write that in for her, and 1928.”
“And her parents?”
“Write ‘dead.’ Or ‘deceased.’”
“You never met them, right?” she asked. Lacy sighed and shook her head. “She didn’t even know their names.”
“Don’t bad-mouth your mother. She’s a hard worker. Knows how to make a deal.” He drove. “A man and woman come together,” he said. “A man needs a family too. One with no wife and kids draws attention. But a man with them—goes to church, kids in Scouts—folks do business with that man.”
“So you never met—”
“No, never met her parents.”
Lacy looked out the window at the landscape of Chilitown, where the workers lived. Tin-roofed shacks patched with cardboard, smoke drifting up from the cook pits, a row of wooden outhouses at the far end. Bones and bread wrappers and trash scattered around. She passed it every day on her way to school, but that day each object jumped out sharp in her eyes. She thought for the first time that one of those shacks was Xavier’s, where he slept at night.
“Do they like living here?” she asked. “The workers?”
“I expect so.” He worked a toothpick around his mouth. “Down here together, living their own way. They got it good. The company I’m selling to is giving money for a wing on the hospital just for Mexicans, so they can go there when they’re sick and be with their kind, and get better and come back to work.”
“Mexicans have souls, don’t they?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“But they don’t have flush toilets in Chilitown like we do at home,” Lacy noted. “They have outhouses.”
“Flush toilets are expensive.”
“But yesterday didn’t pastor say thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself?”
Her dad cocked his head. “Smart girl.” He looked her up and down. “Not sure what the return is on you yet, but I doubt it’s marrying some boy in town.” He turned back to the road. “Your mom wants one of the new TVs with the color picture. They’re televising Miss America. She says you need to see. I said you’re going to college. Studying science would be my bet.”
Lacy flushed with pleasure. Always her mom talked of Junior’s future—he’d be an Aggie like his dad someday—and not a word about Lacy. Except that she’d be a mom. Her life would start when she got married and had a baby, a boy if she was lucky, and she’d pour herself into her boy and her love would feed his dreams. It made Lacy’s skin crawl every time her mom said it. But her dad thought she was smart.
“Till then,” he said, frowning, “keep wearing the dresses like your mom says.”
Her dad didn’t walk her into the Scouts meeting. He left the car running when he pulled up to the high school, until Lacy got the hint and hopped out of the truck. “Hey,” he called. “I’ll be late. Have Mrs. Melton give you a ride home.”
“Dad,” she whined.
“Tell her it’s coming from me.” He yanked the door shut and drove off.
Lacy was anxious the whole meeting and kept to herself. First they went around the circle and showed family trees, and in front of twenty girls the scoutmaster asked Lacy why hers was missing information. She shrank to nothing in the spotlight, praying she wouldn’t lose a badge over this and fall behind the other girls. Then she fumbled through practicing their song for the pageant. By the time Lacy approached Jenny Melton and her mom for a ride, she felt low. Politely she said her dad was hoping they could bring her home, at which Mrs. Melton nodded and walked away.
Jenny and her mom chatted the whole drive in the front seat, ignoring Lacy in the back. She looked out the window, recalling a time when the farmers’ wives were nice to her but unable to pinpoint when it changed. Mrs. Melton took her as far as the highway connection, stopping the car at the foot of the road to the Adamses’ house. She turned and looked at Lacy with unkind eyes. “I wish your mom and dad a fond farewell,” she said, like she didn’t mean a word of it.
Lacy walked the mile home in the blazing sun. The sharp, familiar smells of cows and manure swirled in the breeze. Red dust coated her saddle shoes. The armpits of her Scouts uniform were soaked, and she was sure, walking in the front door, that her mom would say what a burden Lacy was making her run a new load of wash. But inside it was empty, and she called out to no answer. She didn’t like surprising her mom. Lacy had peeked in the parlor once, unannounced, and saw her sitting on the couch staring off at nothing, her face unforgettably sad. Or another time Lacy heard the radio on and thought her mom was talking to Junior, only to discover her alone in the wing chair repeating the words from the news program in a turned-up twang, like she was practicing how to talk.
She heard her mom’s steps above her, leaving the attic, and then a knock came at the front door. No one ever came to the front. They never had guests, and if Xavier needed her dad for something urgent he used the back door. Her mom hurried downstairs. Lacy retreated to the dining room and watched, shadowed by the buffet. “Last trial of my life,” her mom muttered. “Hold your horses!” She opened the door. A man in a frayed shirt stood there. He had a dirty beard and looked like he hadn’t washed in weeks. It was nothing new. Mexicans showed up looking for work on the lots pretty often, yet her mom froze like she saw a ghost.
“Maria?” the man said hoarsely. His chapped face opened in a joyous grin. He reached out as though to touch her golden hair. “Maria Elena—”
“No work,” her mom said, stepping back.
The man erupted in Spanish while her mom tried to shut the door. “No trabajo,” she repeated, “go away.” But before she could close it the man reached forward and stuck a letter in her hand. He turned his head as he was reaching and saw Lacy. He laughed in surprise and waved sweetly at her. Her mom followed the man’s gaze. “Out!” she shouted, slamming the door. She locked the bolt, closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the door.
The grandfather clock ticked in the parlor.
Her mom stood up straight. She clenched her jaw and raised a cautionary finger at Lacy. “Not a word,” she said.
“Doesn’t Dad need workers now?”
“I said not a word.”
“Who is he?” Lacy asked.
“He’s a man with muddy boots!” she exploded. “Disrespectful girl! To your room. Now.” Her mom grabbed her by the shoulder and escorted her up to her bedroom. Lacy went in but stuck her head out into the hallway as her mom hustled, letter in hand, to her bedroom. “Shut the door,” she called back to Lacy. “You’re grounded.”
Lacy shut it. She turned and caught her reflection in the mirror she tried to avoid. She saw her wild dark hair and potbelly, all the things a husband would never love, her mom said, so how about trying to look nicer and talk less? Lacy didn’t understand anything, why she was disrespectful, or why the man kept repeating a word Xavier had taught her: madre.
She slid her window open, crawled onto the roof, and shimmied along a branch of the cottonwood until she reached the trunk. She scanned the road for the man with the muddy boots, but he had disappeared. She spent the rest of the afternoon watching for him, as her mind wandered in miserable confusion. There was no method to her mom, scientific or otherwise, no clear way to please her that Lacy had ever found. As the sun began to drop, a memory floated back to her from when she was little and walking was still sort of new. She sat at the bottom of the stairs while her mom knelt before her, sliding on her socks and tying her shoes. She looked at Lacy with love in her eyes when she finished. “Go on,” she said, “stand up on your feet.” A nice memory before all the corrections began, the disappointments she brought her mom for not being ladylike or as delicate as her name.
The sound of Xavier’s truck snapped Lacy from her daydream. She watched him park by the barn and go inside. She crawled back into her room and opened the door a sliver. She heard her mom rustling in the attic and Junior downstairs playing with his Roy Rogers figures. Quietly Lacy crept down the hall to her parents’ room, where kids weren’t allowed but Junior slept every night when their dad was away. She shut the door behind her. She knew what she was looking for but not where to look. Under the brass bed? In the hope chest? She paused in front of her mom’s vanity. Its legs bowed elegantly, its lacquered front glowing in the early evening light.
She opened it on instinct and turned over its contents. Creams, tiny scissors, colored powders. But no letter. In the last drawer Lacy found a box of Miss Clairol Golden Apricot dye. She pulled out two more. Her mom’s hair. It never occurred to Lacy that she wasn’t blond. Then, below the dyes, at the bottom of the drawer, Lacy spotted it—a grimy envelope. She opened it and a bead necklace with a cross fell out. Lacy unfolded the letter. Maria Elena, it began, continuing in scratches that Lacy was sure were Spanish. She had a sudden rush of feeling like she might be sick, a hunger to know and a sinking fear that it couldn’t be good if her mom hid it. She closed the drawer, scooped up the envelope and beads, and ran downstairs.
“Where you going?” Junior asked, but she ignored him and took off to the barn.
“Xavier?” she called, running past his truck and into the dim doorway.
“Hey, muchacha.” He walked by her with a grain sack on his shoulder and heaved it onto the truck. “Now is not good. I have to get back to the men and drive them home before dinner.”
“I found this,” she said when he returned to the barn. She held up the necklace. Xavier stopped, watching it twist in the golden sun passing through the barn boards. Dusk approached. He laid his hand gently under the cross. “Is it for church?” she asked.
“El rosario,” he said. “To pray. Protect. Where do you get it?”
“With this.” Lacy handed the letter to him. She studied Xavier’s face while he read, her heart nearly bursting as his eyes widened. “What’s it say?”
“How does it—” Xavier stopped reading and took the envelope from Lacy’s hand. “There’s no stamp, where it comes from, how does—”
“A man came to the house and gave it to her. She sent him away.”
“Away?” he said louder.
“She shut the door. I don’t know. I climbed the tree but I can’t find him.”
“Pocho puta,” he said, shaking his head.
“What does it say? Madre, I could read that, but what else?”
“Your mother’s mother,” Xavier said angrily. “Your grandmother. She is very sick in Mexico and needs money. Doctors.”
“No,” Lacy corrected, “she’s dead.”
“You ask me and I tell you what it says.”
“Lacy?” Her mom’s voice pierced the air, outside the barn. Her feet crunched swiftly down the gravel path.
“Take it, take it!” Xavier hissed, thrusting the letter and rosary at Lacy. But she had already taken off across the barn, toward the secret loose board she and Junior had found behind the grain sacks. She shoved the board and wriggled out of the barn. When she turned around and peered back in, she saw Xavier stuffing the letter and necklace in his pockets—a length of beads still hanging visibly down his thigh. And just before she ran away, Lacy saw her mother’s silhouette in the middle of the barn door, dark against the fiery sunset, blocking his way out.
Lacy’s mom barely spoke at dinner that night, as the three of them ate. Lacy breathed a sigh of relief when she asked to be excused early, promising to run her own bath, and her mom nodded. For hours after she got in bed, Lacy could hear the creak of her mom’s footsteps, pacing the floor of her bedroom. Around ten she heard her dad come in and go upstairs, and then the muffled sounds of their talking—hers high and nervous, his cool and brief.
In the morning Lacy woke up late and came down to a feast. Junior and her mom sat before piles of bacon and pancakes drenched in syrup. A stack waited by Lacy’s place at the table, with a glass of chocolate milk. “Come on, sleepyhead.” Her mom smiled. “Better eat a big breakfast before your pageant. Get your energy to sing.”
Lacy sat down and ate fast, shooting looks at her mom in case she changed her mind.
“Good news!” her mom said. “Your daddy telephoned from his meeting. All the papers signed. Done.” Her chest heaved as she breathed. She smiled like she might cry and touched her eyes with her napkin. “Ten years.” She laughed. “We did it!”
“Daddy sold his business?” Junior asked.
“The land, cattle, machinery, men. Well.” She paused. “All but one. You were right, Junior, about the Border Patrol coming. They came last night and took one of our men. Xavier.”
“What?” Lacy cried.
“Sad.” Her mom shook her head. “After all your daddy did for him, I caught Xavier stealing from us. Jewelry of mine. A necklace.” She watched Lacy serenely. “We couldn’t have an enemy among us. Your daddy couldn’t give a man like that papers, so the patrol took him. Xavier and one other man. A vagrant they found in Chilitown. Maybe that one that came to our door, Lacy. I don’t know. Listen to me, children,” she said, fixing her eyes on her daughter. “We are very rich now. We ruffled a few feathers along the way. That means we have to be careful of people—everyone, everywhere—who want to take what’s ours any way they can. We have to cast out threats to the family. Understand?”
She hit the word “family” hard, like it was hers to open the gate and let you in or not. Lacy was hot with anger but muddled, confused how truth was a threat and lies were safer, and at the table in front of Junior she asked her mom, “Are you Mexican?”
She saw it in her mom’s eyes briefly, a light flashing and shutting off. A cruel, sad thing she couldn’t name, but whatever it was, Lacy sensed something change between them. A terrible feeling like she was outside the family her mom talked about, even if she slept under the same roof and ate at the same table.
Junior turned his head from one to the other, watching.
Her mom laughed. “What a thing to ask! Are you feeling all right?” She pressed her hand to Lacy’s forehead. “I wonder if you’re running a fever.” She watched Lacy. “What I am,” she said slowly, “is a mother who takes care of her children and protects what’s theirs. You and Junior are the future.” Her eyes shone with unfallen tears. “I washed your uniform. Go get dressed.”
The whole drive to the pageant Lacy thought of Xavier. She wondered where he was as her troop paraded past the school cafeteria toward the stage. The Scouts assembled on a set of bleachers behind a gold velvet curtain. Lacy could barely keep from crying as it opened. She was blinded at first by the footlights, and in the whiteness she thought of the calf being born a few weeks ago. She could make out the cafeteria full of round tables with families eating lunch. She saw her mom and dad and Junior, front and center, a circle of mostly empty tables around them, and the families of the farmers she knew sitting farther back and to the sides. And it dawned on Lacy that it wasn’t like she thought in church. It wasn’t out of respect that the farmers gave her family space.
The scoutmaster swung her baton, and the Scouts around Lacy began to sing:
America, oh land of plenty,
Light of hope around the globe,
Send a dream to all our sisters
Who are hungry, sick, and cold.
Open your heart and your hand,
Do what’s right, take a stand,
And together, America
Will heal the world.