She watched him through the kitchen window as he worked.
The blade of the hoe moved sharply, with precision, sliding under the topsoil to cut the weeds off at the root. There were few men his age in the city that could match her husband’s build, could match his thick shock of wiry hair. Broad shoulders, narrow wait, hard and heavy hands. Built by work, cultivation, the weight of years of sod and stone.
A bowl of chopped onions, cilantro and minced serrano chilies sat next to the cutting board, waiting for her chop and add the brick-red tomatoes he had picked not even an hour ago. All of it from their garden, all of it gown by him who labored six days a week in the gardens of others just to spend half of the seventh tending his own. She drew the knife across the first tomato as she drifted back to the first time she saw him, cliff diving with his younger brother to the howls and gasps of tourists in Acapulco.
He was muscular even then, deeply tanned, grimly serious as he traced the ebb and flow of the waves to time his death-defying leaps. Oaxaca, she half-dreamt. When there were violets in my hair and the borrachos fell over themselves to offer me a song. She had come to the coast with her mother to visit a sick uncle when she spotted him. He dove all day for American dollars, and at night he spent them in the cantinas, dancing and taking every girl for her turn with him on the floor. Only once he would say, bowing, and when he kissed my cheek and took my hand and danced with me two times in a row, then three, I knew we would always dance with each other. What can I promise you? he’d asked her, the night of their first dance, and she had answered him: A garden. Promise me a garden, always, and I will promise you my love. And he told her I promise you a garden, always, and later he promised her America.
And now here they were in the home he bought her, built with his sweat and hung with his laughter, their children grown and married. Their children, who would be at the door in a matter of hours with their own children, a garden of smiling faces and round bellies and outstretched arms. As she dropped the tomatoes in the bowl and squeezed a wedge of lemon over it, stirring, she watched him working still, keeping his promise. Their back yard was small, but even so he pressed and kneaded and drew up corn and beans and vegetables, and flowers for her, always flowers, while all the neighbors scratched their heads and fought to keep their grass green. On the radio there was mariachi, and it was summer, and down the back of his shirt a wet V fell steadily from his neck like a cliff diver. So shall I keep my promise, she thought, rapping crisply on the glass and waving to him. He turned to her there and nodded, giving her a wink, shaking the soil from the hoe and mopping his face with the front of his shirt.
She wound the tips of two fingers through the juice and tomato pulp on the cutting board and let them rest between her lips for a long moment. Oaxaca, she smiled, when I was nineteen and taut and every gray hair on my father’s head. Her family had tried to warn her off, half a lifetime ago, but his eyes shone like moonlight on water and are still shining, and we knew then what they could not know. She undid the loose knot and opened up her dress to the window, where her husband was stomping his boots and collecting his tools, not looking up. She pulled a violet from the vase on the counter and slid it behind her ear.
For our age we are built well, she thought, turning to meet him as he would come through the door.
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