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the smell of Obsession and overcooked peas, and something about a broken zipper. Whoever she was, she triggered unpleasant associations.
    â€œYou’ve been living in California, right? I always said you were meant for big things. You with that haircut, that cocktail hat with the birdcage veil.” I did have a hat. And a haircut. “So why did you come back?”
    I was not about to mention Jean Seberg. I did not want to dangle my pearl before this particular sow. When she was handed her latte with a whipped cream dome she reared like a pony, pointed her phone, and snapped a picture of it.
    I let the Starbucks boy sell me a muffin with my macchiato, and I ate it quickly, wiping my finger grease on a tiny cocktail napkin. I carried my macchiato to Swensen Park, named for the enterprising brothers, pig farmers, who came up with the idea of disemboweling the swine right here in Edna, carving them for good parts, grinding the rest for baseball franks and hosing the blood into a cistern so it could be siphoned for headcheese. The Swensens could not have guessed their eponymous park would be the roaming grounds for a Cinco de Mayo party, ranchera music blaring from the cars, the pickups dressed in bunting, the children from the band, relieved of their duties, wandering in groups of three or four with their instruments in one hand and ices in the other, babbling with the rush of accomplishment. Everything about this party—the refreshments, the clothes, the classic convertibles—had been planned for a much warmer day.
    Our mayor was now in a striped serape and a sombrero, spread-armed like a prophet, blessing the subjects who approached him with a goose in the ribs or a jocular half nelson. I was in high school during the last strike, the big strike, when Charlie Burt was the union president, leading a very different parade of angry meat workers down Decatur and toward the gates of the abattoir from which they’d been locked out. The slaughterhouse employees were Anglo then, the grandsons of the Germans and Swedes who busted this sod a century ago: my dad and my uncle, Charlie Burt, almost everyone we knew. They never got back into the plant; my father works at the jail now, and comes home in the morning to sit still for an hour or two. The tendons of his hands were so often serrated, his fingers curve in a permanent cup-shaped craw.
    My parents hold a lot of goodwill toward Charlie Burt. Everybody does. That’s why he’s been mayor so long. He spent his political capital smoothing Edna’s transition. In my weekly phone calls from California I heard my father’s voice ebb in bewilderment. Charlie Burt says don’t blame the Mexicans, they’re just workers same as us, except they get paid half as much. Charlie Burt says it’s a good thing, brings business to town: the taqueria, the money-transfer agency, the furniture rental. My father would be looking out the window, watching the tree surgeons bobbing in their baskets.
    I have to credit the mayor, with his biker clothes and horse teeth. Edna never turned into one of those news-making towns like our Iowa neighbors, busting landlords for housing immigrants, jailing Mexicans for traffic violations, threatening the schoolteachers who refused to turn over lists of Hispanic-surnamed children. Edna had soccer games and harmony dinners, and when the one priest in town refused to perform Spanish mass, Charlie Burt persuaded the Lutheran minister to donate church space to a Spanish-speaking circuit priest who rode into town once a week. Even the mild Lutherans put down their collective foot when Charlie Burt suggested hanging a crucifix at the altar.
    Charlie spotted me and cuffed the top of my spine in his enormous scarred hand. “Look here, everybody,” he said. “This here is Odile, and she went off to California for a few years but now she’s back. Odile, I bet you never thought we’d have a true-to-life Cinco de Mayo