María had stayed at home to take care of her mother since her father couldn’t be trusted to boil a potato and her brothers had gone off to university and never come back. But my boys worry terribly about me, her mother would say to the neighbors who’d come to see her when she couldn’t even move. They phone every week. And I don’t know if María saw red whenever she heard her mother say those things, while she herself scrubbed the bathroom or mopped the kitchen floor, but it was enough to make anyone bubble over with rage and throw the pail of dirty water in the old cow’s face and drag her by
...more
