The Tortilla Curtain
“Cándido was against it. Vehemently. The day before, he’d waited through the slow-crawling morning till the sun stood directly overhead—twelve noon, the hour at which the labor exchange closed down for the day—and then he’d waited another hour, and another, torn by worry and suspicion. If she’d somehow managed to get work she might not be back till dark, and that was almost worse than if she hadn’t, what with the worry—and worse still, the shame. He kept picturing her in some rich man’s house, down on her knees scrubbing one of those tiled kitchens with a refrigerator the size of a meat locker and one of those dark-faced ovens that boil water in sixty seconds, and the rich man watching her ass as it waved in the air and trembled with the hard push of her shoulders. Finally—and it must have been three in the afternoon—she appeared, a dark speck creeping over the sun-bleached rocks, and in her hand one of those thin plastic market bags the gringos use once and throw away.
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