Your name is Teresa Morales, and at fifty-eight years old, you have learned that humiliation has a temperature.
It starts behind your ears, then moves down your neck, settling in your chest like a pot left too long on a flame. It is a heat made of whispers, glances, and the sick little smile people wear when they think they have measured your worth from across a room. You feel it the moment you step into the church in your old green dress and hear the silence around you change shape.
Not silence exactly.
The softer, meaner thing people create when they are talking about you without wanting to be caught.
You keep your chin up anyway.
You have spent most of your life waking before dawn to sell tomatoes, onions, peppers, squash, cilantro, and whatever else the wholesale truck brought to your neighborhood market in Puebla. For years, your hands have smelled like earth and crushed stems, like honest work and tired mornings. Those hands raised your son alone. Those hands packed his lunches, counted coins for school supplies, wiped his fever, signed his papers, and folded every dream small enough to fit inside your apron pocket until one day those dreams came back larger.
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