The first time I met Carmen Rodriguez, she was sitting on the front steps of a small adobe house in an older neighborhood of Albuquerque, waiting for someone she had hired to help her clean.
That someone was me.
I was twenty-two years old, a university student working three part-time jobs while trying to maintain my GPA well enough to keep my scholarship. I had answered her Craigslist ad the same way I answered dozens of ads each month—with the kind of desperation that comes from needing money more than you need pride.
She was seventy-three, though she looked older. Her frame was small, nearly fragile, bent slightly forward in a way that suggested her body had spent decades apologizing for taking up space. Her silver hair was tied back in a simple bun. Her hands were weathered—the kind of hands that had done physical labor their entire lives and had the wrinkles to prove it.
“You’re the boy who called about the housecleaning?” she asked as I approached, her accent thick and beautiful, the kind that told me she had been born somewhere warm and had carried that warmth with her even as she aged.
