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Mohlly! ” How they knew her name, I don’t know. When I went out to introduce myself, they asked, “ Cadê Eskyloh? ”—Where is Skyler? “Victor’s?” They already knew.
    One day, early on, Katia’s Aunt Laura intercepted me at the market. She immediately introduced me to a cousin who ran a vegetable stand. “You must buy your vegetables from her.” And she promptly told her, and everyone else we met, that we were living at No. 52 Praça Jácome Calheiros. There would be no secrets.
    We would find ourselves using “the cooler” to escape more than just the heat.
    In Penedo, I found that the simple act of speaking took a lot of thought. It was like doing a math problem every time you wanted to open your mouth.
    â€œThey just know which words are masculine and which are feminine,” Peter said incredulously one day. “They don’t even have to think about it!”
    Every day in Brazil, I’d realize—after the fact—that I’d just said something ridiculous; and every day, I’d think how kind Brazilians are. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t deride. They might look momentarily confused, but it would pass as I blundered on and they teased out my meaning.
    How many times did I ask Iago, the ten-year-old boy next door, to return our cake, instead of the ball? How often did I tell Bentinho, our newfound capoeira teacher, that I needed to sit and rot, instead of stretch? Funnier still, Peter, early in his Penedo soccer career, got hit with a ball in the groin and groaned, “ Minhas castanhas! ”—My cashews!—thinking castanhas was the word for nuts . Who knows if they even use that slang?
    It turns out they use a number of English words, but with a Portuguese twist. They add a long e at the end, and in Portuguese, an r at the beginning of a word is pronounced like an h . Together this results in great transformations, like hockey ee holy : rock and roll.
    In Portuguese, when you say, “I am,” you need to distinguish between “I (temporarily) am” and “I (permanently) am,” because you use different words depending on your state of being. Thus, “I am— eu sou —(permanently) a woman,” but “I am— eu estou —(temporarily) tired.” I could never think fast enough which one I needed, so I unconsciously settled on always using the temporary. I was temporarily Molly and Skyler’s mother; I was temporarily American; and my house was temporarily there, i.e., tomorrow it might be gone. This choice was probably a reflection of just how tenuous our life there felt to me in general.
    By the end of August, two months into our time in Penedo, we were wondering if it was worth it.
    One day, I was sitting at my little corner desk in our front room,which we’d dubbed “the garden room” for its wicker couches and giant plants, finally getting down to work. I’d given myself the first months to get situated in this new place, but now I needed to turn at least some of my focus back to my work from home. After twenty years of teaching, I’d retired from the university two years before. I had wanted to focus on running my dance company, Headwaters Dance Co., which I’d separated from the university several years earlier, and I had wanted more flexibility in my days for the last years before Molly left for college.
    While I’d founded the dance company with a colleague under the auspices of the university, when my partner decided she no longer wanted to share in directing the troupe, I pulled it off campus. I thought that if I were going to continue to direct it on my own, it would be more efficient to run it as a nonprofit. When I announced my intention to separate the company from the university, the university’s legal advisor threatened me, saying, “You’ll never last a year out there,” as though I were heading out into the