He stared at her, a sunburnt Valentina, a pants-wearing woman with her hands on her hips. He longed to take her in his arms, to wipe the dirt from her cheek, to tell her how much he’d missed her.
“What the hell are you wearing?” He pointed to her legs.
“Pants, as you can see.” She waved a dirty hand down the length of her leg.
“Where did you get them?” Vicente crossed his arms.
“Not that it matters, but they were your father’s.”
“My father!”
“Las niñas asked about you every day,” Valentina said. “They really missed you.”
“What about you? Did you miss me?” Why were they standing in the road? This wasn’t what he wanted.
“You don’t know how much.” She looked into his eyes, surprised that he’d asked.
“You don’t show it.” His voice was low, a little hurt.
Friends and compatriots surrounded them. Women welcomed Vicente with kisses and murmurs of sympathy for all he must have suffered. Men returned from working a half day, it was Saturday, and stopped to shake his hand. People congratulated Valentina, how wonderful that the police had sent back her husband in one piece. ¡Que gozo they’ll have tonight! A little ron caña, a little Hawaiian moonshine, a little song, a little dance. We’ll celebrate that you survived jail, that we survived another week in the cane.
Vicente said that a man just home from jail needed to talk to his wife in private. Take your time, Vicente! Talk as much as you like. Valentina went to their hut to get some clean clothes for both of them. They left the little girls with Sonia. When they reached the pond, Vicente wanted to ask Valentina if she’d come alone to bathe while he was gone, but he didn’t. She took off her shirt and pants. Valentina dropped the dirty clothes on the ground next to the drying cloths and clean clothes. She picked up the bar of soap she’d wrapped in one of the cloths.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
He hurried to remove his clothes.
She took his hand, drawing him into the pond.
“Welcome home.” She kissed him.
He picked her up and carried her in the water to a depression in the sand where he could stand steady. He held her tight, she wrapped her legs around him. She murmured his name. He called her querida. The soap slipped from her hand.
“Vicente, the soap!”
“Forget it, querida.”
“You need it.”
“Y tú tambien.”
They laughed.
Sometime later, they searched for the bar of soap.
“That soap was a day of hoe hana,” Valentina said.
“We’ll find it.”
“I hope so.”
Vicente ducked his head in the stream and came back up victorious, the bar of soap clutched in his hand.
Much later, they walked to the riverbank.
“Was it horrible? Being without a man?” Vicente set the soap on the grass to dry.
“I missed you most at night.” Valentina looked at him in that way that he loved.
Vicente laughed. “You have no idea how I missed you.”
She handed him a drying cloth.
“You dry me, I’ll dry you.”
“Everyone is waiting for you. Don’t you care?”
“Not really.”
Laughing, Valentina moved out of reach.
She wrapped the towel around her waist and shook her hair, twisting it to squeeze out the water.
“Eugenio brought me your machete. It wasn’t right what the luna did to you. Then to send you to jail for two months.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” Vicente didn’t want to tell her about prison. Not yet.
“Sugar dreams?” She put on her dress.
“More like worries.” He finished drying himself and pulled on his pants.
“I don’t make a lot hoe hana,” she said.
“I’m sorry you had to do that.”
“I had to charge food at the plantation store.” Valentina sat down on the grass.
“That’s all right.” Vicente buttoned his shirt, relishing the laundered cleanliness of the cloth on his skin. “Thank you for the clean clothes.”
“You deserve that and more after all you’ve been through.”
He sat next to her. “As do you.”
They sat without speaking for a moment, looking out at the pond, turning to smile at each other.
“You know those stories they tell in Puerto Rico about los muertos in the countryside? That’s me at the end of the day,” Valentina said. “Muerta.”
“Querida.” He took her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“But las japonesas are very nice.” She smiled at him because he was sitting next to her and calling her querida the way he always did. How she’d missed that.
A bird flew down into the pond. They watched it rise out of the water with a fish in its beak.
“Vicente, why don’t you go on strike?”
“What?”
“Huelga. You and Eugenio and the others should go on strike.”
“They won’t care about a bunch of Puerto Ricans.”
“They will care. They need you to cut their stupid cane. And what about if you got the Japanese to strike, too? Puerto Ricans and Japanese together. Isn’t that a good idea?”
“The Japanese! We don’t know any Japanese, and even if we did, we don’t speak the same language!”
“I know this woman—Mikioki—she’s Japanese. I hoe hana with Mikioki. You can talk to her husband.”
“I don’t know.” Vicente shook his head.
“What is it that you’re always saying—you’re not a cow?”
He laughed. “We’re men, not cattle.”
She giggled. “Yes, that’s it.”
Vicente lifted a long strand of hair; the back of her dress was wet.
“Your hair is still wet.”
“It’ll dry.”
He fiddled with her hair, wrapping a strand around his finger. “I kept thinking about my father.”
“Raúl?”
“He liked you.” Vicente saw her shoulders stiffen, just a little, but he saw it.
He brought the strand of hair to his nose, it smelled like fresh water.
“I had a lot of time to think,” Vicente said. “About us. You. Him.”
“You’re not making any sense.” Valentina flipped her hair in front of her face, her fingers searched for knots.
“I want to see your face.” He took her by the shoulders and brushed her hair from her face. He could have been gentler.
“Was there something between you?”
“Why would you ask me that? Jail must have made you crazy.”
“Was there?” Vicente looked into her eyes.
She turned her head. “I won’t talk to you when you’re like this—”
There had been something. Vicente’s hands became tangled in her hair. “Did he do this—”
“Let go of me!”
He let her go.
Valentina moved away. “You must be crazy!”
“Whenever I think of you and my father, I feel a little crazy.”
He looked at his wife, her dark hair falling to her waist, arms crossed over her chest, her brown eyes frightened.