Chapter 2 Summary

The narrator is now one of the sisters - the one that "didn't go to war," she tells us. She recalls her sister's plan to leave Tucson to work in the cotton fields around Chinandega in Nicaragua. She leaves in August, and the sister who is narrating remembers how close they have always been and how painful the separation is.

The narrator now tells of leaving Tucson also but on a Greyhound bus bound for Grace, Arizona, where the children were born and raised. She is tall, she tells us, like her father and sister.

The narrator arrives in midmorning, and she feels as if she's a stranger even though little has changed in the fourteen years she has been away. She describes a scene that includes orchards, "confetti-colored houses," and the old Black Mountain copper mine.

The narrator has left Carlo, her...