“You’re the boy who called about the housecleaning?” she asked as I approached, her accent thick and beautiful, the kind that told me she had been born somewhere warm and had carried that warmth with her even as she aged.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m Diego.”
She smiled, and something in that smile communicated kindness—genuine, uncalculated kindness, the kind that comes from a person who has spent a lifetime noticing other people’s struggles.
“I can pay you two hundred pesos each week,” she said, using the old currency almost unconsciously. “Or about twenty dollars in real money. It’s not much, but it’s what I can manage.”
I nodded. It wasn’t much. But added to my other jobs, it would help me cover rent and still buy decent groceries instead of the ninety-nine-cent ramen noodles I had been living on for the previous semester.
