Javier was not a great picker. “Everything hurts,” he said, as the wooden handle of the machete blistered his hands and his shoulders began to ache. After 45 minutes, he stepped back to consider his progress. He had almost cleared the space around a single tree.

“This is killing me,” he said, dropping his machete, his shirt soaked through in the heat. He waited until his father disappeared over a hill to fertilize more trees and then collapsed in the shade for a break. In Ohio, his work breaks had come every two hours, when the assembly line at his window factory stopped for regular maintenance and employees went to the air-conditioned break room to eat free cookies and watch TV. He had worn a walkie-talkie then in his role as a manager, and it was his job to call everyone back to the line at the end of each break. He had never felt more a part of America than he did in those moments, hearing his own voice over the factory loudspeakers, issuing orders in English.

His younger brother saw him resting in the shade and sat next to him. This brother had been 3 years old when Javier left for the United States. Now he was 17 and thinking of leaving himself. He picked a lime off a tree and hurled it into the river.

“These things are expensive over there,” Javier said, picking up a lime and throwing it, too.

“How much?” his brother asked.

“Two for a dollar at the grocery store,” Javier said. He pulled out his wallet and showed his brother his Acme grocery discount card. His brother took it carefully into his hands, admiring it. Then Javier handed him more: Walgreens Rewards, Speedway, Aéropostale Insider Club, AutoZone and his timecard for work.

“You get paid by the hour over there,” he explained.

“How much?” his brother asked.

“Eighteen an hour,” Javier said. “But that was good. That was at the end.”

“Eighteen dollars,” his brother said, laughing. “Eighteen to give orders.”

Their father came back for more fertilizer and joined them under the tree. It had devastated him when his two oldest sons decided to leave for the United States, and he had spent a week trying to change their minds. Didn’t they understand the value of working alongside their father, uncles and cousins? He had always found comfort in routine, in knowing the exact parameters of his life: a town of 987 people and 47 cars, where he owned 26 chickens and two cows. Over the years, when his sons called home after midnight shifts from their bunk-bed apartments, he would remind them of the simple things they had chosen to leave. Their mother’s tortillas on the wood-burning stove. The relief of chilled coconut milk after a day in the fields. Fourteen relatives living within a quarter mile. “A family should be together,” he had told them, and at first he felt vindicated when Javier returned home.

But after a week of Javier’s daily phone calls to Ohio, the sight of him hunched over the phone had started to remind Cresencio of the years he had spent missing his own sons. One night, when the phone was broken again, Cresencio had taken Javier to the church, where they lit a candle in prayer that he could return to the United States.

Now he kicked Javier playfully in the leg. “You got lazy over there,” he said. “A big boss, yeah? You got soft. We’re just starting.”

“Let’s go,” Javier said, and he grabbed his machete and began to clear the ground around a second tree.