She told me.
It took a long time. I'm going to tell it shorter than she did, because some of it was in Spanish and some of it was in English and some of it was in no language at all, just my mother looking at the tabletop and moving her thumb back and forth along the grain of the wood.
My father's workshop made tile. Hand-painted, the kind they sold to the hotels and the restaurants in the old city for the tourists. He had borrowed money to start it, not from a bank, because no bank would lend to a twenty-six-year-old tile setter from a village up in the hills, but from a man in the market, a chulquero, which is what they call the moneylenders who don't need paperwork because they have other ways of making sure you pay. In 2009 the tourists stopped coming, the way they did everywhere that year, and the hotels stopped buying tile, and my father couldn't pay, and the interest doubled, and then doubled again. In the spring of 2010 two men came to the workshop and broke his left hand with a hammer, carefully, one finger at a time, and told him that next time it would be his wife, and after that it would be the baby.
"His hand," I said. "His hand, the—"
"The fingers that don't bend," my mother said. "He told you he caught it in a tile saw."
He told me he caught it in a tile saw. I had believed that for as long as I could remember. My father, who was so careful with every saw, every blade, every tool, who made me wear safety goggles to hand him a level.
My Tía Jacinta had married an American, a mail carrier from Jackson Heights who was a citizen, and she had become a citizen too. She sent the letter of invitation. We got the visas, all three of us, a family of tourists, a teacher and a businessman and a baby, going to visit relatives in New York for six months and then coming home. That was what they had told the man behind the glass at the embassy in Quito, and at the time, my mother said, they had even believed it. Six months. Long enough for the men in the market to forget about them. Long enough for my father's hand to heal. And then six months became a year, and then the men in the market went to my grandmother's house in Cuenca to ask where her son-in-law was, and then a year became two, and then Tía Jacinta's husband knew somebody who knew somebody in Danbury who needed a tile setter who could work with one bad hand, and my mother found a lady in Ridgefield who needed somebody to clean her house on Thursdays, and then another lady, and then twelve ladies, and then it was fifteen years.