“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”
Still, our fear didn’t dissipate, and by the afternoon we heard from Brahim’s sister that he had been arrested. No one knew where he was being held. Others in our circle of graduate students had also been swept up. It was a matter of time before they would be forced to give up the names of supposed accomplices. Maryam’s relief that I had been spared the same fate turned into a vow: she would never go through this ordeal again. Her older brother lived in Culver City and had once offered to sponsor us for visas to the United States.
She said she wanted to leave.
We landed at Los Angeles International a few months later, only to find the Golden State in the middle of a recession. After she’d dropped out of college, my wife had worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office in Casablanca, but here in California no one was hiring, especially not a new immigrant with a shaky grasp of English pronunciation. And I was a graduate student in philosophy; all I knew was how to pontificate about Sartre or Lévinas. But I came from a long line of bakers—my father and grandfather ran neighborhood ovens all their lives—and when I heard from Maryam’s brother about a donut shop in the Mojave that was up for sale, I said we should try to buy it.
“You?” Maryam asked. She couldn’t believe that the graduate student who spoke so fervently about the plight of workers laboring under the boot of capitalists suddenly wanted to start a business. I told her we had nothing to lose but the futon we’d been sleeping on since we landed. Besides, I pointed out, I wasn’t the one who’d been desperate to move here. We had to do something.
Before leaving Casablanca, we had sold my car, her jewelry, and all our belongings, but that only added up to a few thousand dollars, so we borrowed the rest from her brother and sank everything into the shop, which we renamed Aladdin Donuts. I repainted the walls, fixed rickety chairs, and replaced the light fixtures. The menu above the counter listed some items I wasn’t sure I could reproduce: apple fritters, cinnamon rolls, bear claws. I tore it down and decided to sell only donuts and coffee. Donuts were not that different from our sfenj, and I experimented with the dough until it became as soft as the one I had grown up with.
For the first year, Maryam and I slept with Salma between us on an air mattress we laid out in the utility room. I baked and worked the cash register, and Maryam cleaned and handled the bookkeeping. Every penny that did not go toward bills or supplies went to pay her brother back for the money we had borrowed. On Fridays, we went to senior centers, police stations, local schools, construction sites, bringing samples in pink boxes that bore the logo of our shop. People who tasted my special honey glaze raved about it to their friends. Word began to spread. The shop turned a profit. We were able to move into a proper apartment and, three years later, into a house. Nora was born. Maryam quit the shop to take care of the girls. That was how we came to this country.
Efraín
Marisela was waiting up for me, with the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table. I thought it was La Prensa, which she buys from Kasa Market sometimes, but when I sat down across from her with my plate and soda, I saw that it was the Hi-Desert Star. I kept my eyes on my food. I just wanted to enjoy my torta de carnitas. I deserved that, at least, after the rough day I’d had. Enrique and I got lost for an hour in Landers, trying to find the duplex we were supposed to clean, and when we finally got there, the lady of the house was mad at us and followed us from room to room while we shampooed the carpets, making us go over the same dirty spots, even though the stains were old and wouldn’t come out. Then she tried to use a coupon to pay, and Enrique had to tell her three times that those coupons were for Rob’s Carpet Cleaning and we worked for Ron’s Steam Cleaning and Upholstery. The delay pushed all our other appointments back and in the evening when we returned the van, Ron called us careless and stupid and lazy. All I wanted now was some peace.
But my wife nudged the paper toward me.
“I don’t read English,” I said, irritation bubbling up in my voice, although the truth is that I can read some, enough to fill out a job application or make sense of the notices pinned on the corkboard at the grocery store. HOUSE FOR RENT. CAR FOR SALE. JANITOR NEEDED.
“It’s about the accident,” she said, tapping her index finger on an article to draw my attention to it. Marisela took an English class some years ago, before the children were born, and now that they’re in school she goes to the library with them on Saturdays and sits beside them while they read, so she’s getting better and better. She’s the one who talks to the landlord when there’s a leak in the bathroom or if we’re behind on the rent. “It says the police is asking for the public’s help with the case. Look. Right here.”
“I don’t have my reading glasses,” I said.
Marisela pulled them out from her apron pocket and set them in front of me on the table. At the time of these events, she was working for a senior-care center, bathing and grooming people who had forgotten how to do it for themselves. That job changed her. It gave even the smallest of her gestures a disarming patience.
I pushed the reading glasses off to the side. “Later,” I said, and took a bite of my torta. But it didn’t taste right. Even though it had been wrapped in aluminum foil and kept on the stove warmer, the bolillo had soaked up the sauce and the meat was dry. It seemed to me the day’s frustrations would never end. “What is this?” I asked.
“They’re looking for witnesses.”
I had told her a million times that I wasn’t a witness. I didn’t see the accident. All I saw was the man falling to the ground, it wasn’t the same thing. I split the bolillo open and, pushing aside the onions and chiles, poked at the meat with my knife. “Did you use pork?”
“It says the victim lived in Yucca Valley.”
“You know I don’t like it when you use beef in the tortas. It doesn’t taste the same.”
“He was sixty-one years old. And he was a father and a grandfather.”
She said this just to make me look at the newspaper, and finally I put on my reading glasses. In the photograph, an old man with a wide forehead and curly white hair reclined in an armchair, smiling at someone out of the frame. On his lap was a paper plate with a crumpled napkin and a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake. It was the kind of picture you might take at Christmas or a birthday party, when the house is full of family and friends and everyone is dancing and having a good time. The caption said Driss Guerraoui. What a strange name, I remember thinking. “Where is he from?” I asked.
Marisela leaned closer, and read the article again. “It doesn’t say.”
He couldn’t have been American, that much I knew. He had to have been an immigrant like me. And Guerraoui sounded like Guerrero, but it wasn’t a Spanish name. With my knife, I flipped the bread back on the meat. “This isn’t pork,” I said.
“It is. I just trimmed all the fat,” Marisela said.
That was another thing that had changed since she’d started working for the senior-care home. She wanted us to eat “healthy” things. No more chicharrones while we watched television. No ice cream after dinner. Only one spoon of sugar in our morning coffee. But now that she was trimming fat from my carnitas, she might as well have been trimming joy from my life.