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ferry to Fajardo. She had been a virgin when she left with Correa, but she can’t be sure that her daughter is.
    “I’m going over in the afternoon ferry,” Correa continues. “They’re kids. They can’t get too far.”
    She and Correa had hidden out in his aunt’s house. They re- turned to Vieques after a month, to live in a shack he’d inherited from another aunt. The day they arrived, Ester came to see them, carrying all of América’s things in pillowcases. She dropped them in the middle of the floor. “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Then she left. Eight months later, when América was seven months pregnant and Correa had begun an affair with another woman, América wrapped up her things in the same pillowcases and moved in with her mother in the house she had grown up in, where eight weeks later Rosalinda was born.
    “What do we do if she’s pregnant?” América asks, her voice calm, even to herself.
    Correa slaps the steering wheel. “I’ll make him marry her.” “She’s fourteen, Correa. People don’t get married at fourteen.” “What are you suggesting then?” He looks at her with real
    curiosity, as if he has no idea what she’s going to say.
    “I’m not suggesting anything. She’s fourteen, that’s all I’m saying. She’s too young to get married.”
    “Son of a bitch! It’s illegal to do it with a girl that young. I’ll kill that son of a bitch.”
    América hummphs. Men are so stupid! Doesn’t even occur to him that she was that young when he took her off the island.

    And there has never been any talk of them marrying, not before, not after Rosalinda was born.
    “You’re my woman,” he said to her. “We don’t need a paper to prove it.” He’d gone on to prove it to the whole island, how- ever, in other ways. She examines her face in the side mirror. Her cheeks are puffy, her lower lip swollen. Correa’s woman stares back.
    They pull up in front of América’s house. Correa waits for her to climb down from the passenger seat. “Stay home and don’t get into trouble,” he warns. “I’ll take care of everything.”
    He waits until she’s gone into her house, then roars away as if he can’t wait to get out of there.

    Ester has made a thick asopao, but América isn’t hungry. She changes out of her torn clothes and takes a shower. 1-Ier arms, neck, and shoulders are etched with deep red scratches that sting when she soaps. The first tears she sheds are of pain. But the ones that follow come from a deeper place than the surface scratches on her skin. She beats her fists against the tiles and sobs until it seems her insides rip.
    The look of disdain in Yamila’s eyes is hard to erase. Yamila, who as a girl went around with her nose in the air, like she was better than anyone else in the barriada, then married a Nuyorrican who can’t even speak Spanish, a civilian consultant to the U.S. Navy who built her a house high on a hill, looking down on everyone else. América has cleaned her house too, has done her laundry, and once walked in on her by accident and saw her shaving her pubic hair. A week later Yamila fired her and has had it in for América ever since.
    She raises her face to the stream from the shower and lets the water mingle with her tears, fill her mouth, enter her ears, trickle down her neck, between her breasts, over her belly.
    “What are you doing in there?” Ester bangs on the door, her speech slurred.
    “Go away, I’m taking a shower!” “I have to pee!”
    She stumbles out of the shower, grabs a towel, wraps herself

    in it, and leaves the bathroom. Ester stares at her as she goes by. América can barely see where she’s going, her eyes so swollen they can hold no more tears.

    “I told the boy’s family that if he runs away, there’s nothing we can do. These are family matters, understand?”
    Officer Odilio Pagán sits at the kitchen table, eyeing Ester’s frosty beer. América puts a tall glass of lemonade in front of him. “But