Dante and I were talking as we gathered up the all the dishes. My mother took off her apron. “Your mother is a brilliant woman, Dante.”
As my mother walked out of the kitchen, I said, “Mom, you know, this washing-dishes thing isn’t such a big deal.”
“Good,” my mother said. “Then you can start doing the dishes after dinner from now on.”
I could hear her laughing all the way down the hall. I liked my mother when she behaved like something in between the good schoolteacher that she was, and the little girl that still lived inside her.
Six
AFTER LUNCH, LEGS AND I were sitting on the steps of the front porch. Gina and Susie whisked Dante away. They were all too ready to give him a ride home and get more information about how Ari and Dante came to be Ari and Dante. They certainly weren’t going to get any information out of me—and they knew it. But I didn’t really mind. I already knew that Dante was going to be one of Susie and Gina’s favorite people. I was discovering that I wasn’t the jealous type.
Legs looked up at me in the way that dogs do. “I love you, Legs,” I whispered. It’s easy to tell a dog you love her. It’s not so easy to say those words to the people around you.
Seven
DANTE ASKED IF IT WAS okay if he went to Cassandra’s brother’s funeral with me. “I know that I don’t really know Cassandra—and I didn’t know her brother. But I feel like I should show a little solidarity. Does that make sense to you?”
“It makes sense, Dante. It makes perfect sense. I’m sure Cassandra wouldn’t mind.”
My mother told me she would be wearing a white dress to the funeral—which seemed odd to me. She explained that all the Catholic Daughters were going to march in procession wearing white dresses. “For resurrection,” she said. My father and I were wearing white shirts, black ties, and black suits. We were on the porch, waiting for my mother—and my father kept looking at his watch impatiently.
I don’t know why my dad got impatient at moments like these. Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church was close, and it didn’t take but five minutes to get there. “I’m going to go pick up Dante,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the church.”
Just then, my mother walked through the front door. I saw a look on my dad’s face I’d never seen before. Or maybe that look had been present many times before—it was just that I hadn’t noticed. My mother could still take my father’s breath away.
* * *
Dante and I were sitting next to my father. The priest was about to bless the casket at the entrance to the church. Susie and Gina sat right next to us. We nodded at one another. I leaned over to Susie and whispered, “I didn’t think you were Catholic.”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t have to have to be Catholic to go to a Catholic funeral,” she whispered back.
“You look pretty,” I whispered.
“At least you’re learning how to make up for saying stupid things,” she whispered back.
“Shhh,” Gina said.
My father nodded and whispered, “I’m with Gina.”
The opening hymn began, and the voices of the choir sang out. The Catholic Daughters filed in, two by two, in a slow and respectful procession. There were maybe sixty of them, perhaps a few more. These women knew something about solidarity. I saw a look of grief on many of their faces, including my mother’s. Mrs. Ortega’s grief was their grief. I’d always thought those ladies were a little bored with their lives and they themselves were a little boring—and that was the reason they’d become Catholic Daughters. Yet another thing I’d been wrong about. They had far better reasons. I’d never found it difficult to keep my mouth shut—but maybe I should think about keeping my mind shut when it came to judging the things other people did that I didn’t understand.
The Mass was a typical funeral Mass—except it was bigger than most. And there were a lot of young men there who were about Diego’s age, men in their twenties, and they all sat in the back of church and there was a lot of sadness in their eyes and they had this look as if they knew they weren’t welcome, and it made me angry that they’d been made to feel that way. Anger, there it was again, and I think I was beginning to understand that it was never going to go away and that I’d better get used to it.
* * *
Dante and I got in my truck, and we became a part of the procession leading to the cemetery. I thought about my parents. I agreed with my dad and his thoughts about the religion they were raised in—and the religion I was raised in. And I knew somewhere inside him, my father still considered himself a Catholic. My mother was every bit the good Catholic woman she made herself out be. She didn’t have a difficult time forgiving her church for its failings.
Eight
DANTE AND I DIDN’T SAY much as we followed the long line of cars toward the cemetery. I thought of the enlarged photograph of Diego that had been placed on an easel in the front of the church. He was a handsome man with a clean-cut beard and clear dark eyes that were almost as black as his hair, the same eyes Cassandra had. He was laughing, and it must have been a candid shot because the wind seemed to be playing with his thick hair. I tried to imagine the day it was taken, before the virus entered his body and stole it from the world. I tried to imagine the thousands of men who had died, who had names and families and had known people who loved them and had known people who hated them.
They had been alive once, and they had known something about what it was to love and be loved. They weren’t just numbers that someone kept count of. Dante asked me what I was thinking. And I said, “My dad told me that during the Vietnam War, there was a body count. He said that the country was counting bodies when they should have been studying the faces of the young men who had been killed. I was thinking that the same thing is happening with the AIDS epidemic.”
“That’s exactly what’s happening,” Dante said. “We’d rather see a number than a life. And I asked my mom why so many of the newspapers and the media referred AIDS as an epidemic when it was actually a pandemic that’s spreading all over the world. She said that my question was very astute, and she said that she was happy to know that I was looking at the world with open eyes. Her feeling was that maybe they didn’t want to give AIDS that kind of importance. That most people wanted to minimize the disease. What do you think, Ari?”
“I think your mother’s right about almost everything.”
* * *
I had only glimpsed Cassandra as she’d walked down the aisle with her mother at the end of Mass. I was looking for her and finally spotted her standing at the edge of the crowd circled around her brother’s casket. She was wearing a black dress and she’d draped a Mexican gold silk scarf around her shoulders. As she stood there, she looked like the sad, solitary figure I’d seen when I’d first stepped into her backyard. Only this was different. Despite her sadness, there was something else, something more. She wasn’t hanging her head in any kind of shame. The afternoon sunlight seemed like it was shining on her and her alone. And she had a look of defiance. She wasn’t broken, and she wasn’t going to break.