Marco's in the block hut with the door open, one hand on the frame.
He tips his chin at me and steps back.
She's small.
Something's wrong with how small she is, and I don't have the word for it.
Her jacket's too big and it isn't warm enough, zipped to the chin, and her hair's pulled back so tight it changes her face.
Her feet are planted. Her hands are out of her pockets. She hasn't moved. She's looking at me.
I put my hand on the gate. "Ma'am."
Nothing.
"It's forty degrees. Whatever this is, you're not doing it out here."
Her eyes go across my face.
Slow. One side to the other and back, like she's reading something she used to be able to read, and I stand there and let her because I don't know what else to do with myself.
Freckles across her nose.
Not many. A scatter over the bridge and out onto her cheeks. And one of them sits low and off by itself, near the corner of her mouth.
The gravel's coming up.
I've got the gate in my hand, and I'm holding it hard enough to feel the wire, and I don't remember reaching for it.
There's no air. I'm pulling, nothing's coming, and my ears have gone hot, and everything past her has gone gray at the edges.
I'm looking at that freckle by her mouth and I cannot make my eyes go anywhere else, not one inch, not for one second.
I used to put my thumb on it.
I used to put my thumb right there, and she'd bite it.
Some noise comes out of me.
It isn't a word. It's the sound you'd make if somebody put a knife in under your ribs and you weren't expecting it.
Marco takes a step out of the hut and then stops, because there's no reason for it, because it's noon and it's cold and there's a woman standing at a fence.
I buried this.
Ten years ago I buried her, and I did it right. I did it the way you do it, I put her in the ground, and I salted it, and I never once went back and dug.
I didn’t literally kill her, but figuratively, I killed her memory.
Not on the bad nights. Not on the ones worse than that.
Every day I've had since I was twenty-five is stacked on top of that hole, every single one, and she's on the other side of a chain-link gate in Chihuahua breathing.
She's breathing.
There's a wet heat climbing the back of my throat and my eyes are burning.
I'm not doing anything about any of it.
