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the situation. God was not a prosecutor with whom I could plea bargain to obtain a favorable deal for my client—in this case, the baby. It finally hit me that I’d been working too hard, so I concentrated my energy instead on trying to take better care of myself and not being so crazy. That would do more for the baby than cutting deals with God.
    I paused for a second outside Marti’s room. God hadn’t punished me. For reasons I couldn’t fathom he had given me a husband who adored me and a child who was a joy.
    What else could I want?
    Marti was a month shy of his third birthday. We’d named him after the Cuban patriot José Martí, and he was the spitting image of his father both in looks and character. He was built solid, with his father’s dark hair and shining black eyes. Sometimes it was disconcerting to look at him and see a mini-Ariel staring back with the same intensity as his papa. It was like a window in time, a glimpse back to my husband’s childhood.
    I went in on tiptoe and spied on Marti sleeping in his bed. He even looked like his father when he slept—blissful, completely relaxed. I remembered the first time I ever saw Ariel, ten years before, at the University of Miami law library. Ariel had been comfortably ensconced in a study carrel—I soon learned he went there because he could never get peace and quiet at home. Ariel still lived with his family in those days; his mother and three brothers shared the same crowded two-bedroom Miami Beach apartment they had had for years. The father had left the family when Ariel, the youngest, was a baby. He was never heard from again, and money was always tight. From what little I had heard about Ariel’s father, though, they were better off without him. Better no father than a bad father.
    At the time, I was a first-year law student at Duke. I had gone to the UM library because I had to do some research for a legal writing class paper that was due after Thanksgiving. All the carrels were occupied, and I was on a tight schedule. In desperation I began asking each occupant if they were planning on leaving any time soon. Ariel was the fourth person I asked, and the last. We struck up a conversation about what I was working on. It turned out Ariel was ranked first in his class. He helped me out without making it seem like a big deal.
    I had to go back to Durham in two days, so we made open-ended plans to see each other over Christmas vacation. I had just started to date a classmate back at Duke, Luther Simmonds, an American from New York, so I wasn’t particularly eager to get involved with anyone else. It’s funny to think about it now, but I had a feeling that things between Luther and me might work out on a permanent basis.
    Since Ariel was from Miami Beach, he hung out with a completely different crowd than mine growing up. Dade County is really several cities, and people stayed within their orbit, but our never meeting before was more than a fact of geography. We came from different social classes and, to be frank, we wouldn’t have been comfortable with each other and didn’t share much of anything in common. For the older generations, it’s an accepted fact of life that Cuban exiles of different classes don’t interact socially, but for the younger that’s slowly changing. We interacted for business reasons, of course; that was accepted and encouraged. But, for now, it was also pretty much the full extent of class mixing. The fact that we’re all exiles isn’t enough to make us overlook social status. There were strong memories of who was who in Cuba, but as the older generation died out, so did the individuals listed in the Chronica de la Vida Social —the Cuban social register.
    I liked Ariel, though, and we saw each other a few times during various vacations when I was back home in Miami. Our friendship developed very slowly, as we really weren’t at ease with each other. We knew about our differences, thus made a conscious effort to overcome