She had little to pack. She had not drawn many clothes from the community store in the past decade. Her old keepsakes had vanished over the years, one after another—most left behind when they became colonists, the rest broken by children, gnawed by insects, dissolved in one or the other of the two big floods or rotted afterwards by fungus. She still had a chipic of Humberto and herself at their wedding, and one of the first two children, and a ribbon she had won in primary school for spelling, now faded a pale pearly gray. That and the fruit dish her mother-in-law had given her, an ugly thing which had survived her intentional carelessness when more beautiful things perished. She could easily be ready in less than thirty days. Except—she leaned her head against the handle of the hoe hanging on the toolshed wall. Somewhere inside, at the moment the young man had said she was leaving, things changed. She felt for that change, as she would have fumbled in the shadowy house for her crochet hook in its bag of yarn.
She wasn’t going. Ofelia blinked, suddenly wider awake than she remembered being for a long time. A memory welled up, clear as morning dew that reflected tiny curved pictures of the world around it. Before she married Humberto, before she got involved with that fool Caitano, back when she had just finished primary, she had flourished that spelling ribbon in her father’s face and insisted she was not—absolutely was not—going to quit school and go to work in the local branch of Sims Bancorp cleaning the floors at night.
Her mind recoiled from the memory of what had followed that defiance; the facts were enough without the emotion. In the misery of being only a janitor—she, who had won a scholarship to secondary, a scholarship Lucia had taken instead—she had fooled herself into a relationship with Caitano.
But—she retreated from all that to the cool dawn shadow of the toolshed. But she was here, and she was not going. She felt light, suddenly, as if she were falling, as if the ground had disappeared from under her feet and she would fall until she found the middle of the planet. Was this joy, or fear? She could not tell. She knew only that with every heartbeat her blood carried the same message to bone and muscle: she was not going.
“Mama!” Barto, at the kitchen door. Ofelia grabbed the first tool her hand fell on, and she backed out of the toolshed. Pruning shears. Why pruning shears? Nothing needed pruning. She turned around, and found the words to say.
“I can’t find the little nippers, the ones for the tomatoes.”
“Mama, forget the tomatoes. We won’t be here to harvest them. Listen—we’re having another meeting. The Company says it doesn’t care about the vote.”
Of course the Company didn’t care. That’s what it meant to be on contract. She understood that, if she understood nothing else, what it meant to be signed, sealed, delivered to the masters. They would not listen to the colonists any more than Humberto had listened to her. She did not say this to Barto. It would only provoke another argument, and she disliked arguments, especially in her special time, the early morning.
“Barto, I am too old for these meetings,” she said.
“I know that.” He sounded impatient, as always. “Rosara and I are going; we want you to begin the inventory.”
“Yes, Barto.” Easier that way. He and Rosara would go, and she could come back out and smell the garden in the morning, its best time. “And we need breakfast,” he said. Ofelia sighed, and hung the pruning shears back on their hook. Already the sun was burning away the morning mist, and she could feel heat on her head. Already she could hear voices from other houses, other gardens. Rosara could cook breakfast; she usually did. She didn’t like the way Ofelia cooked.
Inside, Ofelia mixed flour and oil and water to make the dough, patted it out, and flipped the thin rounds on the griddle. While they browned, she chopped onions and herbs, leftover sausage, cold boiled potatoes. When the flatcakes were done, she rolled them deftly around the cold filling, adding a dash of vinegar and oil. Barto liked these; Rosara wanted a hot filling. Ofelia didn’t care. This morning she could have eaten metal shavings, or nothing. She paid no attention to Rosara’s ritual complaint, or Barto’s ritual compliment. As they finished dressing, she scraped the cutting board into the garden pail.
After they left, Ofelia carried the garden pail out and dumped it into the trench, kicking dirt over the curls of potato peels, the limp ends of carrots and turnip greens, the bits of onion and herbs. The sun lay a warm hand on the back of her neck, and she realized she’d come out without her hat again.
That would be one benefit of staying behind. No one would nag her to wear a hat.
TWO
Barto and Rosara returned from the meeting in exactly the mood Ofelia expected: angry and depressed and ready to take it out on her. Luckily, the meeting had taken longer than she’d thought—they must have argued strongly—so she had the inventory well under way.
“We don’t need those things,” Barto said, of the first category. “I told you—all these things made here—they’re worthless.” He went into their bedroom, and from the sounds he made was throwing all the clothes on the floor.
“They say we have no right to choose where we go,” Rosara said. She moved around the kitchen restlessly, picking up and putting down one utensil after another. “They say we have to be ready to leave in twenty-nine days, and all we can take is twenty kilos per person. We’ll have to go in cryo, and we won’t know where we’re going until we arrive—”
“Barbarians!” Barto stood in the doorway, arms full of clothes. All, Ofelia noticed, were his clothes. “Everything we’ve done—all these years—” Ofelia did not remind him that he had been a baby at first; most of the time he had enjoyed the work of others.
“What will they do with the colony itself?” she asked.
“What do I care? Destroy it, leave it to rot, it doesn’t matter.” He retreated to the bedroom again; Ofelia heard the clothes hit the bed in a soft whumph. “Mama! Where’s the luggage?”
Ofelia bit back a laugh and tried to answer calmly. “There’s no luggage, Barto.” Why would he think they had luggage? They had never needed it.
“You and papa had to carry things here in something.”
“The Company gave us a box.” The box had gone into the structure of the recycler; everyone’s boxes had. Everything that came down had been put to use.
“They won’t give us anything, they said. They said we have to pack it ourselves, in something that will stack in the hold.” He glared at her as if that were her fault, as if she were supposed to solve this problem.
“We can sew something,” she said. “There’s all that cloth in the supply room. If we’re not going to need it for clothes for everyone, we can make something to hold the allotments.” She wasn’t going, she reminded herself, but it was an interesting problem. She had always liked solving problems. Already her mind ran over what she could remember about luggage seen all those years ago, before they emigrated. Other peoples’ luggage—she and Humberto had never traveled—some of it made of fabric shaped into boxes or tubes, some of it molded from plastics. In thirty days, it would be easier to sew it. She thought of the others who used the machines, the ones who were quickest, the ones who could make patterns.