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Wade winks at me just as I am pulled into Alodia’s lair. My trip across town to Boyle Heights and ultimately into this dingy little room full of filthy sinks and filthier dishes makes me feel like I am on shrooms again.
    My fall into the rabbit-hole did not end up in Wonderland, but rather an airless tomb desperately in need of a window or, at least, four or five dishwashers.
    “We’re washing them in these sinks?” I say more to myself than to Alodia. I immediately regret that she could hear my snobbish, rhetorical question.
    “You were expecting the Ritz Carlton?” she teases and hands me first a sponge and then a dishrag.
    “I came here to work,” I offer.
    Alodia chuckles. “Did you now?”
    I ignore her implication and eye a sink wondering what the first step would be in this endeavor. Alodia steps in front of me, grabs a sink stopper and places it in a drain. She runs the hot water.
    “Hot water. Not too much soap,” she advises.
    I begin washing pots and pans. Alodia concentrates on the smaller dishes. It takes a thing Alodia calls a scouring pad for me to scrub caked on spaghetti out of a five-gallon kettle.
    We talk very little for the better part of an hour. Wade occasionally enters to grab some of my clean cookware which makes me work harder and harder to make them so spotless they shine.
    “Nice work, Cassidy,” he says. I notice the sweat on his neck and fight off thoughts of scrubbing him in my shower with a soapy sponge.
    “Cassidy is your surname?” Alodia asks as she carries a stack of bowls to the tables behind us.
    I’m confused at first, but, in the end, it’s a simple question. “It’s my father’s name. Yes.”
    “You are Irish.” Alodia says.
    “Irish and Swedish,” I say.
    “Ah, your mother is Swedish,” she states.
    When I don’t answer Alodia catches something in my eyes, a glimmer of nostalgia caused by her use of present tense and my mother.
    “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she says. “It’s hard to be motherless in this world.”
    “It was long ago,” I say to make her feel better.
    “No need to be brave with me,” she says. “A thing like that is never long ago. It’s always yesterday in your heart. I know.”
    I marvel at her ability to read me so easily. I debate whether there would be any point to try to hide my feelings for Wade but then I remember she has already teased me when I said I was here to work.
    She knows.
    “Are you from Boyle Heights, Alodia?”
    “As opposed to Mexico, you mean?” she grins. “Nope, I’m from Michigan. Ann Arbor.”
    “Really?” I say half expecting her to say she was only joking.

“I teach Speech Pathology and Linguistic Anthropology at Loyola Marymount,” she says. “My father taught civil engineering at Michigan.”
    “I didn’t mean to—”
    “It’s okay, honey,” she says. “I’m a withered old Mexican lady you met in a Boyle Heights shelter. I would expect you to think I swam across a river to get here.”
    “Speech pathology and?” I ask to change the subject.
    “Linguistic Anthropology. It’s my super power.”
    Wade suddenly enters to grab a stack of her bowls. He gives me a worried look. “Now you’re in trouble, Erin,” he says. “Alodia knows all.”
    When he leaves I realize her sinks are empty. Alodia joins me to help finish the last two pans. She turns and stares into my eyes in an intense way. “I don’t know all,” she says, “but I have figured out a few things about you.”
    “Such as?” I say as indifferently as possible.
    “For one, you were not born and raised here. My super power tells me there is some Minnesota in your dialect.”
    Alodia is a scary little woman, but I like her. “You can do that just from the way I talk? That’s incredible.” I say. “Is there anything else about me that you know?”
    “Maybe, but not every secret a girl has should be shared.”
    I nod and try to understand, but think I do. She knows I’m reluctantly under his spell.
    “It was