The most common English word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. It was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. Again and again, I watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry," when they had done nothing wrong. I have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip-only to say sorry anyway when none was given.
In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.
And yet it's not only so in the nail salon, Ma. In those tobacco fields, too, we said it. "Lo siento," Manny would utter as he walked across Mr. Buford's field of vision. "Lo siento," Rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where Buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. "Lo siento," I said to the boss after missing a day when Lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the "evidence." "Lo siento," we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. "Lo siento, señor," each of us said as we walked past the truck with Buford inside blasting Hank Williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of Ronald Reagan taped to the dash. How the day after, we began work not with "Good morning" but with "Lo siento." The phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.
I think of those men who sweated, who joked and sang beside me in the endless tobacco. How George was one grand away, about two months of work, from buying his mother a house outside Guadalajara. How Brandon was going to send his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, to university in Mexico City to be a dentist, like she always wanted. How after one more season, Manny would be back by the seaside village in El Salvador, running his fingers over the scar on his mother's collarbone where a tumor would've just been removed using the pay he received removing tobacco from the Connecticut soil. How he'd buy, with his remaining savings, a boat and try his luck fishing for marlins. Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.
The day's work done, my white tank top so stained with dirt and sweat, it was like I wore no shirt at all as I walked my bike out of the barn. Fingers sticky and raw over the handlebars, I plunged my silver Huffy forward, down the dust-blown street, past the vast and now empty distances where the crop once stood, the sun burning low above the tree line. And I heard them behind me, their voices distinct as channels on a radio. "iHasta mañana, Chinito!" "¡Adios, muchacho!" And I knew which men the voices belonged to. Without looking, I could tell Manny was waving, like he did each day, his three-and-a-half-fingered hand black against the last light.
What I wanted to say to them, as I rode away, and also the next morning, all mornings, is what I want to say to you now: Sorry. Sorry that it would be so long before they would see their loved ones, that some might not make it back across the desert border alive, taken by dehydration and exposure or murdered by drug cartels or the right-wing crack militia in Texas and Arizona. Lo siento, I wanted to say. But I couldn't. Because by then my sorry had already changed into something else. It had become a portion of my own name-unutterable without fraudulence.
Which is why, when the boy came to me one afternoon, the boy who would change what I knew of summer, how deep a season opens when you refuse to follow the days out of it, I said "Sorry." The boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work -- want. That August, in the fields, it was he who came into my vision. Near day's end, I felt another worker beside me but, caught in the rhythm of the harvest, couldn't stop to consider him. We picked for about ten minutes, his presence intensifying on the periphery until he stepped in front of me as I reached to lift a wilted stalk. I looked up at him, a head taller, his finely boned face dirt-streaked under a metal army helmet, tipped slightly backward, as if he had just walked out from one of Lan's stories and into my hour, somehow smiling.
"Trevor," he said, straightening up. "I'm Trevor." I would know only later that he was Buford's grandson, working the farm to get away from his vodka-soaked old man. And because I am your son, I said, "Sorry." Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.
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