When I think now about what a country is supposed to be, at its best, I think about Mai’s foil packages, and the sideways-moving surplus, and a table that had no head and turned no one away.

Chapter 8 — Darnell

The boy showed up in June, sixteen, sullen, dropped off by a county van to work off forty hours of community service for something nobody asked about, and he made it clear in the set of his shoulders that he intended to do the minimum and vanish.

Sal assigned him to me.

I understood later that this was deliberate, that Sal placed people the way he placed plants, by some read of what would grow next to what, but at the time I thought only that I was being handed a problem.

Darnell did not want to be there, and I did not know what to do with a teenager, and for the first few days we worked in a silence that was mostly his.