The first time Marcus Walsh delivered to the Aguirre place, he thought the old woman might be dead. The farmhouse sat like a dropped stone in the middle of forty acres of scrubland, paint peeling off its boards like sunburned skin. No movement behind the windows, no sound except the wind working through the broken corn stalks from last year's harvest that nobody had bothered to disc under.
But then the screen door creaked open and there she stood, all four feet eleven inches of her, wearing a housedress that might have been blue once and holding exact change plus a two-dollar tip.
"You're late," Esperanza Aguirre said, though he wasn't.
"Sorry, ma'am. GPS took me down Spur Road first."
"GPS." She said it like spitting out a seed. "I been living here forty-three years without GPS."
That was April 2020, when the world had gone strange and Marcus had gone from teaching tenth-grade history to delivering Thai food and grocery orders to folks scattered across three counties of Nebraska farmland. The app called it "contact-free delivery," but out here, where the nearest neighbor might be five miles off, contact was all anybody wanted.
By July, he knew the rotation. Tuesdays and Fridays to Esperanza. She'd switched from Thai to having him pick up groceries from the Hy-Vee in town. The notes with her orders grew longer, more specific. "The small cans of tomato paste, not the large. Check expiration dates. If they don't have the good tortillas from Lincoln, don't bother with any."
One Friday in August, the heat hanging over the plains like a wool blanket, Marcus found a paper bag on her porch next to the grocery money. Inside: six tamales wrapped in corn husks, still warm, and a note: "For your boy. You mentioned a boy."
He had mentioned Tommy, probably complained about him. The kid was sixteen and angry about everything—the divorce, the move from Omaha, living in a shit apartment above the hardware store, having a father who'd gone from respectable teacher to gig-economy nobody. Every other week, when Tommy stayed with him, they circled each other like suspicious dogs.
Marcus ate one tamale in the car, windows down, dust from the gravel road settling on the dashboard. The masa was perfect, the pork inside braised so long it fell apart on his tongue. He saved the rest for Tommy, who would eat them without comment but would eat them all.
September came with its false promise of fall. The orders from Esperanza got stranger. Five pounds of sugar. Mason jars. A particular brand of Mexican vanilla from a specialty shop in Grand Island that cost twelve dollars a bottle. She was cooking constantly, he realized, though she lived alone and never mentioned visitors.
One Tuesday, she met him at the door holding a shoebox.
"I need you to take this," she said.
"Ma'am?"
"It's gorditas. And soup. Albóndigas. Do you know albóndigas?"
"I can't take your food, Mrs. Aguirre."
Her face, already stern, hardened further. She was handsome in the way of women who'd worked outside all their lives, skin like leather, eyes that had stared down plenty of hard seasons.
"You think I cook for myself? An old woman living alone? I cook because my hands remember how. But the food..." She pushed the box at him. "The food needs someone who's hungry."
Marcus was hungry. Not just for food but for something he couldn't name. He took the box.
Through October, as the corn came down and the light turned golden, then gray, the boxes kept coming. Pozole. Carnitas. Mole that must have taken her days to make. Tommy started asking about "the Mexican lady." Started waiting for delivery days.
"Why's she cooking so much?" Tommy asked one night, mouth full of her rice pudding.
"I don't know."
"You should ask."
"It's not my business."
Tommy gave him that look teenagers perfect, the one that says you're a coward and we both know it.
The first November snow came early, before Thanksgiving. Marcus fought through it in his Civic, chains on the tires, heater barely working. When he got to Esperanza's place, no lights were on. He knocked, then knocked harder. Finally tried the door—unlocked, like half the farmhouses out here.
He found her on the kitchen floor, conscious but unable to get up. No drama to it, just an old woman who'd fallen and couldn't lift herself. Marcus got her to a chair, wanted to call an ambulance, but she grabbed his wrist with surprising strength.
"No hospitals."
"You need to get checked out."
"No hospitals," she repeated. Then, softer: "Sit down. I'll make coffee."
"You just fell—"
"Sit down, Marcus."
She knew his name. Of course she did. She probably knew everything about him—small towns and their rural orbits ran on information the way cities ran on electricity.
She made coffee on the stove, the old way, and served it with condensed milk. They sat at her kitchen table, which was covered in an oilcloth printed with roses. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and old wood.
"I'm dying," she said, matter-of-fact as commenting on weather.
Marcus started to speak, but she held up a hand.
"Pancreatic. Found out in March, right before all this"—she waved at the world—"started. Funny timing, no? The whole world gets sick when I do."
"Treatment—"
"Would give me maybe three months more. Bad months." She sipped her coffee. "I've seen plenty of death, Marcus. Worked the sugar beet fields when I was young, before I married Walter. Saw men die from the heat, from the work. Saw Walter die slow from the cancer in his lungs. I don't want the hospital death. Tubes and machines and strangers."
Marcus thought of his own father, five years gone, the last weeks in the ICU. The way the man who'd taught him to fish and fix cars became a body that breathed because machines made it breathe.
"The cooking," he said.
"My mother's recipes. My grandmother's. I wanted to make them all one more time. To remember." She smiled, the first real smile he'd seen from her. "And to feed someone. Cooking for one is just eating. Cooking for others is love."
They sat in silence for a while. Outside, the snow kept falling.
"I need something from you," she said finally.
"Anything."
"Don't say that so quick. It's a big thing."
She stood, steadier now, and went to a drawer. Pulled out an envelope, thick with what looked like cash, and a photo. The photo showed mountains, purple-gray in the distance, and a small village clustered at their feet.
"San José del Progreso. Michoacán. Where I was born." She touched the photo gently. "I haven't been back in forty years. Too busy living, then too busy dying."
"You want to go back."
"I want to die there. In the cemetery next to my mother. The plot's been paid for since 1962."
Marcus looked at the photo, the envelope, the old woman standing straight despite the pain she must be in.
"When?"
"Soon. Before winter really comes. Before I can't travel." She pushed the envelope toward him. "Ten thousand dollars. Enough for gas, hotels, food. Enough to pay you for the time."
"I can't—"
"You can. You will. Because you're a good man trying to pretend you're not. Because your boy needs to see you do something that matters. Because I'm asking and I don't ask for things."
Marcus thought of Tommy, who'd be with him next week. Thought of his ex-wife, who'd call him irresponsible. Thought of his delivery app, his shit apartment, his life that had become a series of trips between places where other people lived.
"I need to talk to my son."
"Bring him. The money's enough for three."
"That's kidnapping. Taking a minor across state lines—"
"It's a road trip. Americans love road trips."
She was smiling again, and Marcus saw in that smile the young woman who'd crossed borders, picked beets under the Nebraska sun, buried a husband, and kept going. Who was still going.
Tommy, surprisingly, said yes immediately.
"When do we leave?" was all he asked when Marcus explained the situation the following week.
"You don't think it's crazy?"
"Yeah, it's crazy. So what? You think sitting in this apartment isn't crazy? You think your life isn't crazy?"
The boy had a point.
They left on a Thursday morning, the 19th of November. Marcus had told his ex-wife they were going camping for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Not entirely a lie—they'd be camping some nights, when motels were scarce.
Esperanza had packed one suitcase and a cooler full of food for the road. She wore her best dress, navy blue with small flowers, and a coat that had seen better decades. When Marcus lifted her suitcase into the trunk, it weighed almost nothing.
"How long since you've been in a car this long?" Tommy asked from the backseat as they pulled away from the farmhouse.
"Walter and I drove to California once. 1979. To see the ocean." She adjusted her seatbelt. "He threw up on the beach. Too much beer the night before."
Tommy laughed, actually laughed, and Marcus realized he hadn't heard that sound in months.
They drove south through Kansas, the land flat as paper, wind turbines spinning lazy in the distance. Esperanza told stories. How she'd crossed the border hidden in a truck bed with fifteen others. How she'd met Walter at a dance, him the worst dancer she'd ever seen but persistent. How they'd lost three babies before giving up, each loss a stone in her chest that never dissolved.
"Why didn't you go back before?" Tommy asked as they stopped for gas in Wichita.
"Ashamed," she said simply. "Left to make something of myself. What was I going to show them? A dead husband? No children? A farm that barely grows weeds?"
"You survived," Marcus said. "That's something."
"Surviving's not living, teacher. You should know that."
She was right. He did know that.
They stopped for the night in Oklahoma, a motel that had seen better days but was clean enough. Two rooms. Esperanza insisted on paying cash.
"Save the receipts," she said. "For the story you'll tell someday."
That night, Marcus heard Tommy talking to someone on the phone in the parking lot. His mother, probably, lying about where they were. The boy was becoming his accomplice in this strange journey, and Marcus didn't know whether to feel guilty or grateful.
The second day took them through Texas, the landscape changing from plains to hill country. Esperanza grew quieter as they drove, occasionally pointing out the window at things only she could see significance in. A particular type of tree. The way the light hit a distant hillside.
"My mother saw mountains every day," she said. "I used to think the horizon here would drive me crazy, all that emptiness. But you learn to see different things. The way weather comes from miles away. The way the grass moves like water."
They stopped for lunch at a truck stop near Austin. Esperanza barely ate, pushed food around her plate. Her face had a gray tinge that hadn't been there that morning.
"We can stop for the day," Marcus offered. "Rest."
"No. We keep going. I'll rest when I'm dead."
Tommy snorted. "That's dark, Mrs. A."
"Call me Esperanza. And yes, it's dark. Death usually is."
But she was smiling when she said it.
They crossed into Mexico at Laredo as the sun was setting. Esperanza had her documents ready—she'd become a citizen in 1995, she told them, after years of renewals and applications and fears of deportation. The border guard looked at her passport, at her face, and waved them through.
"Welcome home," he said in Spanish.
Esperanza closed her eyes and didn't speak for fifty miles.
The Mexico highways at night were different from American ones. Darker, narrower, with trucks that seemed to materialize from nowhere. Marcus gripped the wheel and tried not to think about what he was doing, driving a dying woman and his teenage son through a country he didn't know toward a place he'd seen only in a photograph.
They stopped in Monterrey, found a hotel that was nicer than anywhere Marcus had stayed in years. Esperanza again insisted on paying.
"What am I saving it for?" she said when he protested.
In the morning, she seemed stronger. Ate breakfast—eggs and beans and tortillas that she declared almost as good as her mother's. Tommy practiced his high school Spanish with the waiter, badly but earnestly, and Esperanza corrected him with patience Marcus hadn't known she possessed.
"You have a good boy," she told Marcus when Tommy went to the bathroom.
"He's angry at me. Has been since the divorce."
"He's here, isn't he?"
The last day of driving took them through mountains that grew higher and more severe as they went. Esperanza sat forward now, hands pressed against the dashboard, eyes taking in everything. When they stopped for gas in a small town, she got out and stood very still, breathing deeply.
"Smell that?" she asked Tommy.
"Smells like... I don't know. Dust?"
"Mesquite. And something else. Copal, maybe. Someone's burning copal for the dead." She looked toward the mountains. "Almost there."
San José del Progreso was exactly as the photograph had shown it, if smaller, poorer, more beautiful. Adobe houses clustered around a square with a church that had stood for three hundred years. Mountains rising on all sides like walls or protection or prison, depending on how you saw them.
Esperanza directed them to a house on the edge of town. Pale blue with a tin roof, bougainvillea growing wild over one wall.
"My cousin's daughter lives here. She knows we're coming."
Marcus had never asked how she'd arranged this, whom she'd called. There was so much he hadn't asked.
The woman who answered the door could have been Esperanza forty years ago. The same stern beauty, the same careful way of holding herself. They embraced, both crying, speaking rapid Spanish Marcus couldn't follow.
"This is Rosa," Esperanza said finally. "She'll take care of... after."
The house had two extra rooms, bare but clean. They'd stay a week, it was decided. Long enough for Esperanza to visit the places she remembered, the people still alive who remembered her.
That night, they ate at Rosa's table—her husband, their three children, all of them treating Esperanza like returning royalty. Tommy tried to follow the conversation, gave up, settled for eating everything put in front of him. Marcus watched Esperanza's face, saw it shifting between joy and exhaustion.
"Tomorrow the cemetery," she said as they walked back to their rooms. "You'll come?"
"Of course."
The cemetery was on a hill overlooking the town, crowded with above-ground tombs painted in bright colors—blue, pink, yellow, green. Esperanza walked slowly but steadily to a corner where the older graves lay, some dating back to the 1800s.
"Here," she said, stopping at a simple stone marker. "Maria Elena Aguirre. 1932-1962. My mother."
She knelt, difficulty evident in every movement, and began pulling weeds from around the stone. Marcus and Tommy helped, working in silence until the plot was clear.
"Thirty years old," Tommy said, reading the stone. "That's young."
"Childbirth," Esperanza said. "My youngest brother. He died too. Different times." She touched the stone gently. "She would have liked Nebraska. All that sky."
They stayed there an hour, Esperanza talking to the stone in Spanish, occasionally laughing at some memory. Marcus and Tommy wandered among the other graves, reading names, doing math.
"Lot of young people," Tommy observed.
"Hard place to live."
"Why'd she leave?"
Marcus thought about it. "Same reason people always leave. Hope for something better."
"Did she find it?"
"I don't know. Maybe that's not the point."
Tommy looked at him, that teenage scrutiny that saw through bullshit. "What is the point then?"
Before Marcus could answer, they heard Esperanza calling. She was standing now, but unsteady. Marcus took one arm, Tommy the other, and they walked slowly back down the hill.
The next days fell into a rhythm. Mornings at Rosa's house, Esperanza teaching Rosa's daughters to make recipes she'd carried in her head for decades. Afternoons visiting places—the school she'd attended three years before leaving, the river where she'd learned to swim, the tree where she'd carved her initials with Walter's, though the tree was gone now, just a stump remaining.
On the fourth day, she couldn't get out of bed until noon. On the fifth, not at all.
"Maybe we should—" Marcus started.
"No hospitals," she said firmly. "Rosa knows what to do. This is how it's supposed to be."
Tommy sat with her that afternoon, reading to her from a book on his phone—Harry Potter in Spanish, which made her laugh weakly when he mispronounced words.
"You're a good boy," she told him. "Like your father."
"He's not good. He's just... sad."
"Same thing sometimes."
That night, she asked Marcus to sit with her alone.
"The money," she said. "There's more. In the coffee can above the refrigerator at the farm. Forty thousand, maybe more. I want Tommy to have it. For college."
"Esperanza—"
"Let me finish. The farm goes to Rosa's family. They'll sell it, probably, but that's okay. Land should go to people who'll work it." She paused, breathing shallow. "Thank you. For bringing me home."
"Thank you," Marcus said, "for the food. For feeding us."
She smiled. "Cooking for one is just eating..."
"Cooking for others is love."
She died two days later, Rosa holding one hand, Marcus the other. Tommy was in the garden, helping Rosa's husband fix a fence. Better that way, Marcus thought. The boy had seen enough.
The funeral was the next day—things moved fast here, Rosa explained. The whole town came, it seemed. People who remembered Esperanza as a child, who'd wondered what became of her, who'd imagined her life in America as either tragic or golden, never ordinary.
They buried her next to her mother, in a plot that had waited sixty years. The priest spoke about returning home, about the prodigal daughter, about God's mysterious ways. Marcus thought about mystery, about the strange chain of events that had brought him here, standing in a Mexican cemetery with his son while they buried a woman who'd started as a delivery customer and become—what? Friend seemed too small a word.
Tommy cried at the graveside. Marcus put an arm around him, and for once, the boy didn't pull away.
They drove back three days later, after helping Rosa with the paperwork, the thousand details death demands. The trip north was quieter. Tommy controlled the music, playing songs Marcus didn't recognize but didn't mind. They talked, really talked, for the first time in years.
"I get why you did it," Tommy said somewhere in Texas. "The teaching thing. Why you quit."
"I didn't quit. I was let go."
"You didn't fight it though. Mom says you could have fought it."
Marcus thought about that, about the budget meetings and the union rep who'd told him to make noise, make trouble, make them notice. About how tired he'd been, how defeated.
"Maybe I should have."
"Maybe." Tommy was quiet for a while. Then: "But then you wouldn't have met her."
"No. I wouldn't have."
They reached the farmhouse in the early morning, mist rising from the fields. The place looked different somehow, though nothing had changed. Marcus used the key Esperanza had given him, found the coffee can above the refrigerator. It was full of cash, rolled tight and rubber-banded.
"That's a lot of money," Tommy said.
"It's for you. For college."
"I don't want her money."
"It's not about want. It's about gift. About receiving what someone offers." Marcus thought of all those boxes of food, how hard it had been at first to accept them. "Sometimes taking is a form of giving."
Tommy counted it that night in their apartment. Forty-three thousand dollars.
"We could move," he said. "Get a better place."
"You could go to any school you want."
"We could do both."
Marcus looked at his son, saw him clearly for maybe the first time in years. Not the angry kid or the burden of joint custody, but a person, whole and complicated and trying to figure things out, just like everyone.
"Yeah," Marcus said. "We could do both."
They kept delivering food through the winter, Marcus and sometimes Tommy, who got his license in January. The Aguirre place stood empty for a month before a For Sale sign appeared. By spring, a young couple from Denver had bought it, planning to try organic farming.
Marcus drove by sometimes, never stopping, just looking. The new owners had painted the house white, fixed the sagging porch. It looked like a different place, which maybe it was.
One day in April, exactly a year after he'd first delivered to Esperanza, Marcus found himself at the cemetery in town. He'd brought flowers—marigolds from the grocery store, nothing special. But when he got to where he thought he'd find a stone, there was nothing. Then he remembered: she wasn't here. She was in a cemetery in Mexico, next to her mother, in a plot that had waited most of a lifetime.
He left the flowers anyway, on an unmarked grave that probably held someone who'd died alone, unclaimed. Cooking for one is just eating, she'd said. Dying alone was just dying. But dying where you chose, how you chose, with whom you chose—maybe that was something else.
Tommy graduated that spring, got into the University of Nebraska with a partial scholarship. The rest, Esperanza's money would cover. He was thinking about teaching, he said. History maybe, or English. Something where you could tell stories.
"Stories matter," he told Marcus. "Even the small ones. Especially the small ones."
The night before Tommy left for college, they made dinner together using one of Esperanza's recipes Marcus had managed to write down. Pozole, which took all day to cook properly. The hominy had to be soaked overnight, the pork shoulder braised low and slow, the chilies toasted just right.
They ate it with fresh tortillas and beer—Tommy was eighteen now, Marcus figured one beer wouldn't hurt. They didn't talk much, just ate and remembered.
"You think she knew?" Tommy asked finally. "When she started leaving you food? That it would lead to all this?"
Marcus thought about it. "I think she knew she was dying alone and decided not to. Everything else was just... what happened."
"We should go back. To visit the grave."
"Yeah. We should."
"Next summer maybe. After my freshman year."
"It's a date."
Tommy left the next morning in the Honda Marcus had given him, the same car that had carried them all to Mexico. Marcus watched him drive away, then went inside to clean up the kitchen. The apartment felt different with Tommy gone, not empty but expectant, like it was waiting to see what would come next.
Marcus had applied to teaching positions again, had interviews lined up. Maybe he'd get back to it, maybe not. But he was trying, which was something. He was living, not just surviving, which was everything.
He thought about Esperanza often, especially during his delivery runs. The rural routes had new customers now, young families escaped from cities, trying to make something grow in this difficult soil. He brought them food and sometimes stayed to talk, to hear their stories. He always accepted what they offered—coffee, cookies, sometimes just conversation.
Gift and receipt, offering and acceptance. The small exchanges that make a life.
One evening in September, delivering to one of the new families out past the Aguirre place, Marcus saw the mountains. Not real mountains—there were no mountains in Nebraska—but clouds piled up on the horizon in a way that looked like peaks, purple-gray in the dying light. He pulled over, got out of the car, stood looking at them until they dissolved into ordinary sky.
He thought of Esperanza in her Mexican cemetery, the real mountains standing guard. Thought of his son in his dorm room, probably reading, certainly thinking. Thought of himself, standing on a gravel road in Nebraska, holding someone's dinner, still delivering, still moving between places where people lived their lives.
The food was getting cold. He got back in the car, drove on. There was a customer waiting, hungry, hopeful that what they'd ordered would satisfy. Marcus would bring it to them, would hand it over with something like ceremony, would wish them a good evening and mean it.
It was a small thing, this delivery of food, this basic transaction. But it was also connection, sustenance, care. It was cooking for others, even at a remove. It was love, in its way.
The road stretched ahead, gravel crunching under the tires. The false mountains had dissolved completely now, leaving only sky and distance. Marcus drove on, carrying what someone needed, ready to receive whatever they offered in return.