She rocked in lazy arcs and nodded to sleep, victim to the heat and the steady chickering of the cicadas that sang evening songs to lonely old women.
She had survived fear and pain and submission. Her sister Jacinta was toothless and blind in one eye. Feeble and slow from tequila and virulent fevers he caught from the whores, Jacinta's husband still bellowed and swung out at her in his sleep.
And Lupe, finding love in the smile of a handsome hombre and discovered by her husband at the most irrevocable moment of lovemaking. He had wrapped his fingers around her throat and pressed out her life.
Yolanda only felt loneliness in the dusk of the day. It was the meeting time of a man and his woman. It forgave all wrongs of the night that often lay still cold and heavy as an anvil at dawn. In the morning there were things to be done that hid the seeds of resentment under plates, inside cups.
He slowed, absorbing the hot golden rays through his skin. Chocolate eyes crackled emerald shards of light as he skipped back into a jog that billowed his shirt like a parachute giving chase.
His name was José. Also Joe and Josip and Jozef, but for that one instant of their meeting, the woman asleep on her porch would know him as José.
It had always been this hour that found her vulnerable.
A little girl lived with her mother, father, two sisters and five older brothers in a single room shared with a grandmother and crippled grandfather and a mentally deficient aunt. In the warm nights the boys slept out under the black sky.
People might fight amongst themselves in such close quarters. Squabbles could split them into sides based on promises sworn in spit or in blood. But they each knew, from the nearly blind and deaf abuela to the sweet-faced Yolanda, that the space was too small to divide.