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By Root 285 0

summer when he’d given her the guitar, her apartment still orange in the late evening. Cheno left whenever daylight started to go. She kept the guitar in the closet on his urging, covering it with a light cloth, and whenever he returned, he’d turn the instrument round and round in his hands, checking for cracks before handing it to her. He taught her a few chords and they’d share whatever treat he’d brought her—lemon drops or dried, sugared mango—as he listened to her practice, his patience infinite. She got to thinking, at times when she watched him demonstrate a chord she was finding difficult, that he was the only person who’d been in the apartment besides her mother, yet her mother’s dark presence was long gone, and as the months drifted into fall and sundown came earlier and earlier, she finally made it clear to Cheno that it was okay for him to stay a few minutes longer after she turned on the bare bulb in the center of the room.

You’ll understand one day, her mother had said at the bus station. When you find a man of your own, you’ll know why you’ll run toward him.

Teresa served him dinner once—just once—a small bowl of beans with onions and two corn tortillas, which Cheno ate with relish, his thanks never ending. He refused a second plate. It was getting dark, he told her, and it was best he got home. She watched him from the window as he went down the street, hurrying, and part of her wondered if his secrecy was meant to protect her, to keep anyone from seeing a strange man close the green door at the base of the stairwell.

She knew he was going to ask her to marry him. Not soon, but one day. What she felt for him was affection, not love: she liked the thrill of pulling him closer and closer, then the slight edge of relief when their guitar lessons were over for the night. There were days he stayed away and Teresa knew he’d gone back up into the northern parts of the Valley to make money, but even so, she didn’t want to leave the safety of her single room. It was hers and she was a twenty-three-year-old woman walking down the street and she was no longer Alicia’s daughter.

“Do you sing?” he asked her in Spanish.

She was about to say yes but realized that the songs she hummed to herself were all in English. She didn’t know how he would take this. “Sometimes.”

“Would you sing me something?” He took the guitar and, surprisingly, began to strum something she recognized, a Patsy Cline song. She laughed and shook her head, refusing, but he kept playing the chords over and over until finally she complied, the song she knew so well from the dim glow of the radio, which she left on at night to lull her to sleep. She sang “Walkin’ After Midnight,” casting her eyes over at the open window, remembering her mother and how the room had to be quiet when her records played, the only sound the pain in those women’s voices.

“Que lindo,” Cheno said when they finished.

“Gracias,” she answered, and she was not surprised when Cheno reached over and touched her hand. She could feel the thin plastic of the guitar pick between his fingers, his touch light and unsure.

“We should sing together,” he told her in Spanish.

“What song?”

“No,” he said. “I mean in public. At El Molino Rojo.”

“Why there?”

“So we can earn some money,” he answered. He kept his hand on hers, very light, as he would have done if he’d emerged from the secret shadow where he stood watching her in front of Stewart’s Appliances, reading her desires in the shows flickering across the screen, touching her shoulder. He was asking her for complicated reasons, Teresa knew—to fulfill her dreaming, yes, but also to make their work a joint effort, not just his own sweat in the field.

“But how?” she asked.

Someone on the corner had urged him to go audition at El Molino Rojo, where the bar owner let people sing for tips. Cheno’s plan was to go there on Tuesday afternoon, her day off from the shoe store, and meet her there once he finished whatever fieldwork he’d managed to get that day. She knew what side of town he was talking about, the avenue over on the west. Over