Small Texas outline with heart on upper arm

My grandmother's cousin, Eulalia Ochoa, ran the cantina by the bridge at Presidio when the river was low enough to cross in boots. Every Friday a surveyor came over from the Mexican side with a roll of paper under his arm, and every Friday he unrolled it on her counter and asked the same question. If nobody had drawn the state for you, how would you draw it? She told him the truth. She said she would give it its back to the cold and its belly to the sun, and she would leave a hole in the middle the size of a fist, because that was where people kept the things they could not carry across.

He did not believe her. He went away and came back with a pencil and a brass ruler, and by spring he had made a map of her answer. It was not the true shape of anything. The rivers ran wrong and the towns sat in the wrong places. But the outline was so firm that the clerks in Austin took it for the real one, and for years they pinned it up in their offices and argued over it with their coffee.

When Eulalia died, the cantina had one drawer full of tin charms she had bought from passing travellers, and beneath them lay the surveyor's paper, its centre cut clean out with a blade. Her nephew found it. He told the story to anyone who would sit still, and he always finished by tapping the empty place on the table and saying the heart had never gone anywhere. It was only waiting for someone to bring something to fill it.