Yours to Keep by Serena Bell Page A

curb.
    She could tell that he hadn’t completely given up on what he’d been about to say earlier. He was trying to catch her eye, trying to get them back to where they’d been five minutes ago.
    Back to happiness. And sudden and dangerous intimacy.
    It was very possible that he was about to kiss her. The possibility was so real that her lips tingled. All she’d have to do was turn toward him.
    She reached for the door handle instead, an impulse rather than a decision, lifting, pressing, bursting out of the car and into the relief of the fresh air. Not looking back at him.
    “Thank you!” she called. “Thank you so much for dinner, and for the ride!”
    She knew, without looking back, that he was staring at her. Puzzled.
    “I need a helper,” Ana announced, her voice echoing in the cafeteria.
    Her beginning students looked back at her blankly from where they sat behind cracked and carved-up tables. Their chairs were sticky with gum, their seats covered with graffiti, many of the corners jaggedly broken off.
    Ana pointed at a tiny Chinese woman with streaks of white in her chin-length black hair, sitting at the nearest table. “Ling, come here.”
    Ling glared. Unwillingly, slowly, she extricated herself from her seat and inched toward the podium.
    “Angry,” Ana said. “You are angry.” She made an angry face. “Make an angry face,” she instructed Ling. She’d chosen Ling because even though she was shy, she was an overachiever. There was no way she’d refuse to do what Ana said.
    Ling gave a slight laugh, then made an angry face at her classmates. There were a few chuckles.
    “Ling, what makes you angry?” Ana asked.
    “Stupid teacher,” said Ling, quite loudly and with nearly impeccable pronunciation.
    Now the class roared. Ana laughed, too. She taught them the words “angry,” “stupid,” “teacher,” and then, for good measure, “smart.” Then she let Ling sit down.
    She had no problem getting volunteers for the rest of the emotions. Everyone wanted achance to make faces and report to the class what got their emotions going. A young Somalian mother, her hair hidden under a gold headscarf, told her classmates that it made her happy when her kids said they loved her. A rapid-fire Spanish speaker named Emilio—she thought he was probably Mexican, but she wasn’t sure—said that he was embarrassed that he couldn’t speak English to his son’s friends.
    Then Nati, who was Salvadoran, stood up.
    “Sad,” Nati told them.
    Ana felt a twinge of apprehension. She’d played this game with her students before, but something in Nati’s face made her realize that Nati wasn’t playing.
    “My daughter,” Nati said. “They deport her. Now I have to—” She hesitated. “I have to be the mother of my grandchildren.”
    Ana’s hands got hot, her feet cold.
    Nati started to cry.
    With a superhuman effort, Ana got a grip on herself and put her arm around Nati, who shuddered under the touch, her face a terrible mask of unhappiness, a parody of the emotion she’d chosen to represent. Ana looked around the room. Nati’s expression—grief, fear, and not a little anger—was already echoed on all the other faces. Ana made them repeat “daughter,” “deported,” and “grandchildren,” but she knew the game was over.
    “Conversation practice,” she told them, and counted them off by twos. They broke off into pairs and began their halting, painful conversations. She gathered up her papers. She was sweating hard. She pulled her T-shirt away from her chest to let in some air.
    After class, she stopped Nati. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in Spanish.
    Nati shrugged. “What is there to talk about?” There were huge circles under her eyes, and the flesh hung on her face, an unhealthy yellow. Her hair, pulled back in a makeshift bun, frizzed out in escaped strands around her face.
    “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
    “She got pulled over. She was driving without a license.