"And you are in the line too," Tía Jacinta said, tapping the paper with a long red nail. "Because you were a child when I filed. The children go with the mother. I asked the lawyer, back then. You are on this paper too, mija, even if your name isn't on it."
"How long is the line?" I said.
My aunt and my mother looked at each other.
"Long," Tía Jacinta said.
On Tuesday, my mother took the day off from her Ridgefield ladies, which she had done exactly twice before in my lifetime, once for Iker's appendix and once for Abuelito's funeral, which she had watched on a phone propped against the sugar bowl at five in the morning. My father took the day off from the stone yard. The three of us drove downtown in the truck, exactly the speed limit, hands at ten and two, to an office over a bakery on White Street with a sign in four languages in the window: FREE IMMIGRATION LEGAL CONSULTATIONS. Iker went to Mrs. Gwynne's again, with his swim trunks and his Lego bin and a look on his face that said he understood he was being gotten out of the way and was choosing, generously, to allow it.
The lawyer was a woman named Ms. Dobrin, who was about my mother's age and wore reading glasses on a beaded chain and a cardigan in July because the air conditioner in the office was set to approximately the temperature of the Arctic. She had a framed diploma on the wall from a law school in Hartford and a framed child's drawing next to it of a purple horse with a rainbow coming out of its mouth. She spread everything out on her desk, the Ecuadorian passport and the visa and the white card and the birth certificate and Tía Jacinta's receipt notice, and she read every single piece of it with a yellow highlighter, slowly, without saying anything, for almost twenty minutes, while my mother twisted the strap of her purse and my father sat absolutely still and I counted the ceiling tiles. Forty-two.
Then she put the highlighter down and took off her glasses and let them drop on their chain, and looked at me. Not at my parents. At me.
"Your parents told me you're the one with the questions," she said. "So go ahead. Ask me. I'll tell you the truth, and some of it you won't like."
I had written my questions down. Of course I had. I had written them in the field notebook, the waterproof one, the good kind, because it was the only notebook in my room that didn't have school stuff in it. I opened it on my knee.
"Am I in trouble?" I said. "Like, right now. Am I breaking the law?"