Finally Rodrigo took the blonde's hand in his and led her back to the SUV, helping her up into her seat. She smiled and waved as she drove away. Rodrigo stood looking after the truck, his smile gone into eclipse. His hands dug into his jean pockets and the misery he felt was evident even at a distance. He looked like a man who'd lost everything he loved.

Glory went back to her canning, pensively. She wondered what had gone wrong for Rodrigo that he and the blonde woman weren't together.

She asked Consuelo, against her better judgment.

"Who is that blonde woman who comes to visit Rodrigo?" she asked, trying to sound casual.

Consuelo gave her a stealthy look. "I don't know," she said. "But it's obvious that she means something to Rodrigo."

"I noticed," Glory replied. "She seems very nice."

"He's fond of her, you can tell." She set the timer on the pressure cooker. "But if you look close," she added gently, "you can tell that it's only fondness on her part. She likes him, but she isn't in love."

"He is," Glory blurted out.

Consuelo glanced at her curiously. "You're perceptive."

Glory smiled. "He seems like a good person."

"He's the best. We all like him."

"I noticed that he seems..."

Before she could finish the sentence, the back door opened and a tall, handsome young man with wavy black hair, dark eyes and an olive complexion came in through the back door without knocking. He was wearing jeans and a pullover shirt, and broadcasting gang colors and tattoos.

Glory didn't dare voice that summary. She wasn't supposed to know about gang symbols. But she did. This young man belonged to the infamous Los Serpientes gang of Houston. She wondered what in the world he was doing in the kitchen.

Before she could ask, he grinned and hugged Consuelo, swinging her around in a circle and laughing the whole time.

"Hi, Mom!" he said in greeting.

Consuelo hugged him back and gave him a big kiss on both cheeks. She turned, her arm around his muscular waist. "Glory, this is my son, Marco!" she announced.

4.

CONSUELO'S SON? GLORY had to hide her consternation. The young man was good-looking and personable, but he was unmistakably a gang member. She was worried that Rodrigo might not know. He came from Mexico, from a ranch in a rural area that probably didn't have any gang activity.

"This is Glory." Consuelo introduced her son to the younger woman.

"Hi," he said, smiling. "Nice to meet you."

"Same here," Glory replied, and tried to smile normally.

"Where's the boss?" he asked Consuelo.

"Out in the warehouse," she told him. "You be nice," she added firmly.

"I'm always nice," he scoffed. "He'll love me. You just wait and see!"

He winked at his mother, gave Glory a brief glance and went out the back door whistling.

"Isn't he handsome?" Consuelo asked. "He looks just as his father did, at that age."

Glory had been curious about Consuelo's husband. She never mentioned him.

"Is his father still alive?" she asked delicately.

Consuelo grimaced. "He's in prison," she said bluntly, watching for Glory's reaction. "They said he was smuggling drugs across the border. It was all lies, but we had no money for a good defense attorney, so he went to prison. I write to him, but he's in California. It's a long way, and expensive even to take the bus there." She sighed. "He's a good man. He said the police had him mixed up with a man he knew, but he got arrested and charged just the same."

Glory sympathized, but she wasn't convinced. The state had to have a certain level of evidence before it proceeded to charge anyone. No prosecutor wanted to waste taxpayer money pursuing a case he couldn't win.

"Marco looks just like him," Consuelo continued, smiling as she washed more canning jars and lids. "But he trusts people too much. He was arrested last month in Houston and charged with trespa.s.sing," she added curtly. "Stupid cops! He was just lost, driving around a strange neighborhood, and they a.s.sumed he was involved in a drive-by shooting, can you imagine?"

Drive-by shootings and gang wars over drug turf were commonplace in Glory's world, but she didn't dare mention it. As for the police mistaking a lost motorist for a drive-by shooter, that was unlikely. It was obvious that Consuelo thought her son was the center of the universe. It would do no good to point out that an innocent boy wouldn't be likely to sport gang paraphernalia and tattoos. It was fairly obvious that Consuelo didn't have a clue as to her son's true nature.

"He's very good-looking," Glory said, feigning innocence.

"Yes," Consuelo said, smiling absently. "Just like his father."

Glory had lost track of the good-looking muscular boys who'd pa.s.sed through her office on their way to prison. The whole culture of low-income teens seemed to glorify doing time, as if it were a status symbol for young men. She recalled a social crusader who went into the poor sections of town trying to convince gang members to give up their lives of crime and become useful members of society. In other words, give up the thousands of dollars they made running drugs or manufacturing them to work behind a counter in a fast-food store for minimum wage.

Someone who had never seen the agonizing poverty that produced criminals had no idea how difficult it was to break out of the mold. She'd lost track of the number of poor mothers with absent husbands trying to raise multiple children alone on a minimum wage salary, often with health problems as well. The older children had to help take care of the younger ones. Frustrated by their home lives, when they lacked attention there, they found it in a gang. There were so many gangs. Many were international. Each had its own colors, tattoos, hand signals and methods of wearing clothing to express their particular affiliations publicly. Most police departments had at least one officer whose specialty was the gang culture. Glory knew the basics, because she'd had to prosecute gang members for drug peddling, homicides, burglaries and other felonies. She never stopped feeling rage at the conditions that produced the crime.

She glanced at Consuelo. "Is Marco your only child?" she asked suddenly.

Consuelo hesitated, just for a heartbeat, before she turned. "Yes," she replied. She noted Glory's curiosity. "I had health problems," she added quickly.

Glory smiled convincingly. "He's a very nice young man," she replied. "He doesn't seem the least bit spoiled by being an only child."

Consuelo relaxed and returned the smile. "No. He certainly wasn't spoiled." She went back to her canning.

Glory filed the conversation away. She didn't know of one single family among the immigrants who had less than three children. Many deplored contraception. Perhaps it was true that Consuelo had health problems. But it was curious that she had only one child, and that she seemed so intelligent when she was working at a job that didn't require much education.

That went double for Rodrigo, the educated bit. Glory couldn't figure him out. He seemed the least likely person to be working as a manual laborer. It disturbed her that he'd given jobs to men like Castillo and Marco. Neither of the young men looked like farm hands. They were too savvy.

What if, she asked herself, Rodrigo was himself on the wrong side of the law? The question shocked her. He seemed so honest. But, she recalled, she'd prosecuted at least two people whose integrity was attested to by a veritable parade of character witnesses. But the criminals were only adept at putting on an act. A very convincing act, at that. Very often, people could be the exact opposites of their a.s.sumed roles.

Rodrigo might even be an illegal himself. Glory's stepbrother, Jason Pendleton, was sympathetic to all sorts of people. He might have felt sorry for Rodrigo and given him the job out of sympathy.

What if Rodrigo was illegal, and mixed up in drug trafficking? She felt sick inside. What would she do? Her duty would be to turn him in and make sure he was prosecuted. She, of all people, knew the anguish drug dealers could cause parents. She knew the source of the drug money as well-upstanding, greedy businessmen who wanted to make a fortune fast, without putting too much effort into it. They didn't see the families whose lives were torn apart by the effects of crystal meth or cocaine or methodone. They didn't have to bury promising children, or watch their loved ones suffer through rehabilitation. They didn't have to visit those children in prison. The money men didn't care about all that. They just cared about their profit.

Could Rodrigo be one of those businessmen? Could he be a drug dealer, using the farm as a cover?

Her heart sank. Surely not. He was kind. He was intelligent and caring. He couldn't be mixed up in that terrible business. But what, her conscience asked, if he was? If she knew, if she had proof, could she live with herself if she didn't turn him in? Could she do that?

"My, what a long face!" Consuelo chided.

Glory caught herself and laughed self-consciously. "Is that how I look? Sorry. I was thinking about all that fruit waiting for us in the warehouse."

Consuelo rolled her eyes. "Isn't it the truth!"

They returned to casual conversation, and Glory put away her suspicions.

THAT EVENING, SHE SAT in the porch swing listening to the musical sound of crickets nearby. It was a sultry night, but not too hot. She closed her eyes and smelled jasmine on the night air. It had been a while since she'd been in a porch swing. She tried not to remember sitting beside her father on long summer nights and asking him about days past, when he was a little boy going to local rodeos. He knew all the famous bull riders and bronc riders, and often had invited them to the house for coffee and cake. Her mother hadn't liked that. She considered such people beneath her station in life and deliberately absented herself when they came to the house. She felt her father's sadness even now, years later...

The screen door opened and Rodrigo came outside. He paused to light a thin cigar before he turned toward Glory.

"The mosquitoes will eat you alive," he cautioned.

She'd already killed two of the pesky things. "If they're willing to sacrifice their lives to suck my blood, let them."

He chuckled. He walked toward her and paused at the porch rail, looking out over the flat landscape in the distance. "It's been a long time since I had time to worry about mosquitoes," he mused. "Do you mind?" he indicated the empty place beside her.

She shook her head and he sat down, jostling the swing for a few seconds before he kicked it back into a smooth rhythm.

"Have you always worked on the land?" she asked him conversationally.

"In a sense," he replied. He blew out a puff of smoke. "My father had a ranch, when I was a boy. I grew up with cowboys."

She smiled. "So did I. My father took me to the rodeos and introduced me to the stars." She grimaced. "My mother hated such people. She gave my father a bad time when he invited them to come and have coffee. But he did all the cooking, so she couldn't complain that he was making work for her."

He glanced at her. "What did your mother do?"

"Nothing," she said coldly. "She wanted to be a rich man's wife. She thought my father was going to stay in rodeo and bring home all that nice prize money, but he hurt his back and quit. She was furious when he bought a little farm with his savings."

She didn't mention that it was this house where they lived, or that the land which now produced vegetables and fruits had produced only vegetables for her father.

"Were her people well-to-do?"

"I have no idea who her people were," she admitted. "I used to wonder. But it doesn't make any difference now."

He frowned. "Family is the most important thing in the world. Especially children."

"You don't have any," she said without thinking.

His face set into hard lines and he didn't look at her. "That doesn't mean I didn't want them," he said harshly.

"I'm sorry," she stammered. "I don't know why I said that."

He smoked his cigar in a tense silence. "I was on the verge of marrying," he said after a minute. "She had a little girl. They were my life. I lost them to another man. He was the child's biological father."

She grimaced. His att.i.tude began to make sense. "I'll bet the little girl misses you," she said.

"I miss her, as well."

"Sometimes," she began cautiously, "I think there's a pattern to life. People come into your life when you need them to, my father used to say. He was sure that life was hard-wired, that everything happened as it was planned to happen. He said-" she hesitated, remembering her father's soft voice, at his trial "-that we have to accept things that we can't change, and that the harder we fight fate, the more painful it becomes."

He turned toward her, leaning back against the swing chain with his long legs crossed. "Is he still alive-your father?"

"No."

"Any sisters, brothers?"

"No," she replied sadly. "Just me."

"What about your mother?"

Her teeth clenched. "She's gone, too."

"You didn't mourn her, I think."

"You're right. All I ever had from her was hatred. She blamed me for trapping her into a life of poverty on a little farm with a man who could hardly spell his own name."

"She considered that she married down, I gather."

"Yes. She never let my father forget how he'd ruined her life."

"Which of them died first?"

"He did," she said, not wanting to remember it. "She remarried very soon after the funeral. Her second husband had money. She finally had everything she wanted."

"You would have benefited, too, surely."

She drew in a slow breath and shifted her weight. "The judge considered that she was dangerous to me, so, with the best of intentions, she put me into foster care. I went to a family that had five other foster kids."

"I know a little about foster homes," he said, recalling some horror stories he'd heard from comrades who'd been in state custody, however briefly. Cord Romero and his wife, Maggie, came immediately to mind.

"I think life with my mother might have been easier, even if it had been more dangerous," she murmured.

"Were you there a long time?"

"Not too long." She didn't dare say any more. He might have heard the Pendletons talk about their stepsister. "What was your childhood like?"

"Euphoric," he said honestly. "We traveled a lot. My father was, ah, in the military," he invented quickly.

"I had a friend whose father was, too. They traveled all over the world. She said it was an experience."

"Yes. One learns a great deal about other cultures, other ways of life. Many problems in politics arise because of cultural misunderstanding."

She laughed. "Yes, I know. We had a man in an office I worked for who was Middle Eastern. He liked to stand very close to people when he was talking to them. Another guy in the office was a personal s.p.a.ce maniac. He backed right out a window one day trying to avoid letting his colleague get close to him. Fortunately it was on the first floor," she added, laughing.