Her brain was as sticky as the Honda’s engine. It needed a couple of tries before it would turn over. “But what am I supposed to do? I work for a living, Josefina – I have to. Where am I supposed to take the children tomorrow?”

Josefina’s face set. Nicole damned herself for political incorrectness, for thinking that this woman whom she was so careful to think of as an equal and not as an ethnic curiosity, looked just now like every stereotype of the inscrutable and intractable aborigine. Her eyes were flat and black. Her features, the broad cheekbones, the Aztec profile, the bronze sheen of the skin, were completely and undeniably foreign. Years of daycare, daily meetings, little presents for the children on their birthdays and plates of delicious and exotic cookies at Christmas, reciprocated with boxes of chocolates – Russell Stover, not Godiva; Godiva was an acquired taste if you weren’t a yuppie – all added up to this: closed mind and closed face, and nothing to get a grip on, no handhold for sympathy, let alone understanding. This, Nicole knew with a kind of angry despair, was an alien. She’d never been a friend, and she’d never been a compatriot, either. Her whole world just barely touched on anything that Nicole knew. And now even that narrow tangent had disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” Josefina said in her foreign accent, with her soft Spanish vowels. “I know you are upset with me. Lots of parents upset with me, but I can’t do nothing about it. My mother got nobody else but me.”

Nicole made her mind work, made herself think and talk some kind of sense. “Do you know anyone who might take Kimberley and Justin on such short notice?”

God, even if Josefina said yes, the kids would pitch a fit.