Alma liked the feel of smooth pebbles rubbing against her bare feet whenever she cartwheeled down dirt paths. Sometimes, little jagged pieces of rock stuck out from the dirt and punctured Alma’s tender skin. She cried every time she had to pull rock shards from her flesh. Pain aside, she liked everything about these orchards. A soft breeze often rocked the trees, carrying the scent of orange blossoms across the land. Every time Alma sucked in air through clenched teeth, she wondered if the streets of New York smelled like the trees she and her father slept under every night.
 

“Papá,” Alma called out. On humid days, her father, Marcelo, liked resting beneath the low hanging branches of the biggest orange tree. He enjoyed watching Alma cartwheel down the narrow dirt pathway that separated two different rows of trees. He could afford a small break before plucking more oranges.
 

“Yes?” he asked.
 

“What’s New York like?”
 

“Your cousin tells me it’s beautiful,” Marcelo said. “Busy but beautiful.”
 

“Can I also go to New York when I’m grown up?”
 

“You can leave these orchards like your cousin did, but people in New York know how to count,” Marcelo said. “They count a lot.”
 

Alma knew what her father wanted without him even having to ask. She stuck her arms into the burlap sack resting on its side near the tree’s trunk and lifted six oranges from the sack.Some fruit leaned against her chest before rolling over her thin arms and bouncing against the dirt. She squatted down and stopped the oranges from rolling away.
 

“Uno. Dos. Tres,” Alma began counting. She lined them on the dirt as she did so.
 

“Stop,” Marcelo said, waving his hands at her.
 

Alma licked her cracked lips, preparing her mouth for what she knew came next.
 

“Again,” he said. “In English.”
 

“One. Two. Three.” Alma paused for a few seconds after each word. She ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth. The T’s felt big, odd, chunky. A sack of pebbles rolling around her mouth. “Four. Five. Six.”
 

“Good.” Marcelo nodded. “Again.”
 

He pointed at the first one. Together, father and daughter counted oranges.
 

“One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.”
 

Each number scraped the roof of Alma’s mouth. They punctured her tongue the way those jagged rocks had caused her feet to bleed. For a moment, she wanted to stop and peel an orange. She wanted its tangy juice to coat her dry tongue. Alma thought of her cousin living in New York and wondered if he liked counting every day with a mouth full of rocks. She wondered if she
would learn to like it, too.