Amigoland by Oscar Casares

like that and that things had started innocently between them would do little to help her mother understand what had
     happened.
    She’d learned her lesson with Rogelio. The first years were difficult because of his temper, which seemed to be set off with
     the slightest disagreement. Her mother had told her to be more forgiving, that he would change once they had a family. It
     would be natural for him to want to be patient with their children. And perhaps this was true, but after four years she still
     wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t want to hear about her body. He didn’t want to know about her cycle or anything else that did not
     directly concern him. That was for her to talk about with other women. He was not a woman — he was her husband. And no, there
     was no money to go see a special doctor. If they were ever going to have a child, it would be the same way every other man
     and woman did it, not with the help of some doctor. And so she prayed for God to bring them the child they had been waiting
     for. The miracle happened shortly after their sixth wedding anniversary, only not for her. Rather than stay with him at his
     family’s house, she moved home. Her mother tried to convince her to go back, speaking of him as though nothing had changed
     and he was the same polite boy whose older brother and father had walked over to ask for her hand. The truth was she couldn’t
     stop blaming herself for his wandering and finding someone else who could give him what he wanted. With a baby on the way,
     he started crossing the river again to look for work. She never liked the idea of him swimming to the other side, but it had
     never been in his nature to agree with her, so as usual he continued doing whatever occurred to him. As time passed she came
     to accept that this baby and its mother were not going to change things: Rogelio was still her husband; she was still his
     wife. After a couple of weeks away, she decided she was ready to move back. She was waiting to tell him this when his naked
     body turned up, floating in the steady current beneath the bridge.
    Just thinking of that time made her want to leave the hospital. She stalled by looking inside the bag, pretending to search
     for some item she might have forgotten. After all this effort she knew she couldn’t leave now, not when it had taken her most
     of the morning to work up the courage to ask for a ride. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but it seemed as if la señora had hesitated,
     as if she might not have heard correctly —
The cleaning woman wants a ride to the hospital so she can visit the man she works for?
Socorro wrestled with the feeling that she might be stepping beyond what was considered acceptable or proper, and in this
     way revealing what he had wanted to keep private. She asked herself how it would look if she went to the hospital for any
     of the other people whose houses she cleaned, some for much longer periods of time, but then decided it was better to not
     wait around for the answer.
    She stood at the door, not wanting to interrupt what the doctor might be saying or wake the patient if he happened to be resting.
     Maybe she would just leave his clothes at the nurses’ station. When she did look around the corner, it was a nurse who was
     standing next to the bed and writing some notes on a metal clipboard. Don Celestino was lying back in the bed against a couple
     of pillows. His disheveled white hair from earlier that morning was now combed back in the way he normally wore it, and it
     looked as though he had shaved, maybe even trimmed the edges of his mustache.
    “Is that you, Socorro?” he asked, squinting through his tinted glasses. “You came all this way to visit me in the hospital?”
     He used both hands to adjust himself and sit up straight in the bed. “Look at how they attached all these wires to me. All
     I needed was to eat a good breakfast so my sugar would be back to normal again. Now they want to run some tests, just