They just laughed.
I’d taught Fito and Sam to fold the tops of the paper lunch bags. You had to be careful because if you were in too big a hurry, the bags would rip. No bueno. So they started getting the hang of folding. I grabbed a shovel and poured about six inches of sand into each bag. As I was doing that, I started thinking of the shovel at my grandfather’s burial, and I hated that thought living in my brain, so I just shut it down by thinking of a song. I guess that was another way of whistling in the dark.
We were in my Uncle Mickey’s backyard. He had plenty of dirt, since his dog, Buddy, had dug up half the lawn.
There we were, the three of us, making luminarias.
“Who the hell thought of this luminaria stuff anyway?”
“The Spaniards in northern New Mexico. They used to put little fires on paths to light the way to midnight Mass on Christmas. I think that’s how it goes. They were the original streetlights. Then the fires became paper bags, just like paper lanterns. Sort of. Only they sit on the ground.”
Sam gifted me with one of her looks. If she hadn’t been folding paper bags, she would have crossed those arms of hers. “Thank you, Professor Silva, for the little history lesson.”
“You don’t believe me? Wikipedia it.”
She stopped folding, took out her cell phone, and started her thing. She read it, then looked at me. “So yeah, big deal. You know a few things.”
I have to say I was feeling a little cocky. I dropped the shovel and started dancing around, waving my hands in the air like a super dork. And then I started singing a tune I made up in my head: “‘Call me gringo, now. Call me gringo, now.’”
And Fito, he’s laughing his ass off. “Vato, you just proved that you’re, like, white, white, white. You can’t dance worth a shit.”
“Ah,” I said, “get to work.”
We were having fun. I wondered why one of our hobbies was giving each other a hard time—?part of the friendship thing. The heart, yeah, sometimes I didn’t get it. But if we were making each other laugh and smile, maybe it was part of the way human beings loved each other.
When we finished folding and filling all the paper bags, Fito looked at our handiwork. “You and your peeps, you’re up to your ass in traditions, you know that?”
“You want that I should apologize?”
“Is that your way of saying ?fuck you?”
“You’re quick, Fito. You’re very quick.”
We placed a hundred and fifty luminarias all around Mima’s house and put a votive candle in the center of each bag. “Ah,” Fito said, “the sand. I get it. That way the bags don’t catch on fire.”
“Like I said, Fito, you’re quick.”
“You say that one more time, and I’m gonna do to you what I did to my brother at the funeral home.”
“I’m not sure that therapist is working out for you.”
Sam started laughing, and she said maybe Fito and I should take our show on the road. “Anywhere,” she said, “as long as it’s far away from me.”
Dad and Uncle Mickey and Uncle Julian lit the luminarias as the sun was setting. It was a clear night, and there was only a slight breeze. Perfect weather for luminaria lighting. Mima was no longer walking, and my Aunt Evie and my Aunt Lulu helped her into her wheelchair and bundled her up, and they kept asking her if she was sure she wanted to go outside. “What if you get sick?”
Mima gave them a look. I mean, she could still give looks. “I have cancer,” she said. “I am sick.”
She winked at me. I wheeled her outside and we stopped at the end of the driveway so she could see the luminarias. The lanterns made everything seem so soft, as if a few candles in paper bags could tame the night. Sam and I and Fito started singing her song in Latin. We’d practiced it a bunch of times, but it was Fito who carried us along: “‘Adeste fideles laeti triumphantes, venite, venite . . .’” When we finished, Mima had tears streaming down her face. I knew they were the good kind of tears.
She took my hand, holding tight—?as if she never wanted to let go.
Now I knew why people said things like I’ll take that to the grave. I had always assumed it was a bad thing. Just then I realized that it could sometimes be a good thing. And not just a good thing, but a great thing.
The luminarias lighting up the winter night.
Candles in paper bags.
Mima’s tears.
Christmas.
Midnight Mass
MIMA HAD GONE to midnight Mass every year of her life. Not this year. Not ever again. Dad told us to get dressed, so we did.
Mima sat in a chair in the living room. She was awake. She was thinking. She held Aunt Evie’s hand.
We stood in front of her.
Sam and I waved.
Dad kissed her. “We’re going to Mass.”
Mima’s face lit up. Like a luminaria.
Christmas
CHRISTMAS MORNING, and I was sitting next to Mima in the living room. My Aunt Evie and my dad had to help her into her chair, the one she liked to sit on. Dark clouds were moving in. It wasn’t cold enough for snow.
Rain.
Rain was bad for paper bags.
Rain was bad for luminarias.
Mima and I were looking at my book of photographs. The one I made for her. She looked at them and smiled, and I knew she was remembering.
She didn’t talk much anymore.
A word here.
A word there.
Sometimes a full sentence.
She pointed to a picture of me and her and Popo. I must have been about ten. We were all dressed up. “Dad’s birthday,” I said. She laughed at my caption: Mima is prettier than Popo.
She was staring at a picture of me and Sam when we were seven. No front teeth. We were standing in the front yard. It was summer and the leaves of her mulberry tree were behind us. The caption read: She was always my sister.
“Beautiful,” she said.
I turned the page, and she smiled. It was a picture of the day when we built the human pyramid in my backyard, and I was at the top. The caption read: One day, all these Mexicans built a pyramid to the Sun.
“You were my pyramid,” she whispered. “All of you.”
Dream
I WOKE UP in the middle of the night. I dreamed I was opening my mom’s letter. And my mom was sitting next to me. She took the letter and said, Here, Salvador, let me read it to you.
What if I started remembering a mother I had no real memories of?
I couldn’t fall back asleep.
I looked around the room and remembered that we were still at Mima’s. I was sleeping on the couch. I wanted to walk into her room and tell her about my dream.
But she was asleep.
I didn’t want to wake her.
Home
THREE DAYS AFTER Christmas, my dad was sitting on the front porch with Mima, who was having a good day. Dad looked at the mulberry tree. “I remember when Dad planted that tree.”
“I remember too,” Mima said. “It’s a beautiful tree. I’ve sat in the shade of this tree for many years.”
Mima was like the tree. In this desert where I’d grown up, Mima had shaded me from the sun.
She was a tree. How would I live without that tree?