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reading him stories.
    During the fourth phone call, an aunt told Mom, “We have decided something. It would be good for Pablo to grow up in your rich country, with all the opportunities there. This is what his parents wanted for him. You see, here he will be no one. He will grow up poor. He will stop school at eighth grade to work in the fields and barely make enough to eat. We know you are good people. We hear this in his voice, in your voice. We know that you care for him well. If you want to keep Pablo,” the aunt concluded, crying, “and if Pablo wants to stay with you, that is all right with us.”
    Mom and Juan weren’t sure it was best for him to stay in Tucson, but Dika insisted it was. For once, I agreed with Dika. If Pablo left, the chickens would probably stop laying eggs, and I’d mope along with them, feeling useless. In the end, we decided that Pablo should stay at least until the end of the school year, because, after all, he was just starting to talk and raise his hand in class. That way, Mom and Juan could save up money for plane tickets and afford time off work. Then they would take Pablo to visit his relatives and he could decide where he wanted to live.
    “Too big decision for little boy!” Dika clucked, shaking her head.
    Over the next week, we stood in lines and waited hours in plastic seats at government buildings to get permission to travel with Pablo. The CPS man said we could take Pablo to visit his village, and if he and his closest relatives decided he could live with us, we’d have to sign adoption papers.
    I wanted to stretch out my time with Pablo. We all did. Now, when Mom came home from work, exhausted from being on her feet all day at the café, instead of lying in the hammock and having a beer, she sat cross-legged on the floor with Pablo and played Chinese checkers. Juan started spending his weekends building a playhouse in the far corner of the yard, letting Pablo bring him tools and hold the wood while he sawed. As they worked, he told Pablo the folktales he used to tell me when I was little. Usually, the star of the story was a scraggly little orphan who went on a quest somewhere—to the moon, or the bottom of the sea, or inside a deep cave—and ended up finding a treasure and turning into a world-famous hero.
    Once in a while, Pablo talked about his relatives. He mentioned how good his cousin was at catching lizards, or how fast he could run down the big hill in his village. But mostly, he seemed wrapped up in life with us and the chickens. Every morning he brought a handful of eggs to Mom. The three other hens, too, had started laying them. He was so proud of those eggs. Even though I liked fruit and cereal for breakfast, I forced myself to get used to a daily star-shaped egg instead.

Dika’s Boyfriend
    Back when Pablo first arrived, Dika decided he should learn to swim—or at least that was her excuse for sneaking into the pool at the apartment complex down the street. So, except for the cold months—November, December, and January—we spent every afternoon at the pool. Dika’s daily schedule was: collect broken pieces of colored glass at sunrise, work at the Salvation Army in the morning, and once Pablo and I got home from school, lounge at the pool. She wore a bright blue sarong over her turquoise bikini. She placed her bag by the lounge chair, slipped off her sarong seductively, and settled in the chair. There she lay, her legs like two whales, one bent coquettishly. She would examine her body and check her tan lines, pleased. If anyone else was there, she’d show off the tan lines to them, too.
    “My friends in Germany should to see me now! There it is snowy and cold and gray. Look at this sky, so much blue.” Germany is where she had asylum after she left Bosnia and the war.
    She spread baby oil on her legs, arm, stomach. It took forever, this process—there was so much flesh to cover, and she went over every area twice, three times if a man was there. She wore