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pads.
    “ ‘¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?’ ” Lupe would pray there, incessantly repeating this. “ ‘Am I not here, for I am your mother?’ ”
    Yes, you could say that this was an unnatural allegiance Lupe latched on to—to a mother and a virgin figure, which was a replacement for Lupe’s actual mother, who was a prostitute ( and a cleaning woman for the Jesuits), a woman who was not much of a mother to her children, an often absent mother, who lived apart from Lupe and Juan Diego. And Esperanza had left Lupe fatherless, save for the stand-in dump boss—and for Lupe’s idea that she had a multitude of fathers.
    But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe’s doubt was borne by the child’s judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary—that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.
    Juan Diego could not recall a single dump-reading experience where Lupe might have learned this; as far as the dump reader could tell, Lupe both believed in and distrusted the dark-skinned virgin entirely on her own. No book from the basurero had led the mind reader down this tormented path.
    And notwithstanding how tasteful and appropriate the adoration paid to Our Lady of Guadalupe was—the Jesuit temple in no way disrespected the dark-skinned virgin—the Virgin Mary unquestionably took center stage. The Virgin Mary loomed. The Holy Mother was enormous; the Mary altar was elevated; the statue of the Holy Virgin was towering. A relatively diminutive Jesus, already suffering on the cross, lay bleeding at Mother Mary’s big feet.
    “What is this shrunken-Jesus business?” Lupe always asked.
    “At least this Jesus has some clothes on,” Juan Diego would say.
    Where the Virgin Mary’s big feet were firmly planted—on a three-tieredpedestal—the faces of angels appeared frozen in clouds. (Confusingly, the pedestal itself was composed of clouds and angels’ faces.)
    “What is it supposed to mean?” Lupe always asked. “The Virgin Mary tramples angels—I can believe it!”
    And to either side of the gigantic Holy Virgin were significantly smaller, time-darkened statues of two relative unknowns: the Virgin Mary’s parents.
    “She had parents ?” Lupe always asked. “Who even knows what they looked like? Who cares ?”
    Without question, the towering statue of the Virgin Mary in the Jesuit temple was the “Mary Monster.” The dump kids’ mother complained about the difficulty she had cleaning the oversize virgin. The ladder was too tall; there was no safe or “proper” place to lean the ladder, except against the Virgin Mary herself. And Esperanza prayed endlessly to Mary; the Jesuits’ best cleaning woman, who had a night job on Zaragoza Street, was an undoubting Virgin Mary fan.
    Big bouquets of flowers —seven of them!—surrounded the Mother Mary altar, but even these bouquets were dwarfed by the giant virgin herself. She didn’t just tower —she seemed to menace everyone and everything. Even Esperanza, who adored her, thought the Virgin Mary statue was “too big.”
    “Hence domineering, ” Lupe would repeat.
    “ ‘¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?’ ” Juan Diego found himself repeating in the backseat of the snow-surrounded limousine, now approaching the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK. The former dump reader murmured aloud, in both Spanish and English, this modest claim of Our Lady of Guadalupe—more modest than the penetrating stare of that overbearing giantess, the Jesuits’ statue of the Virgin Mary. “ ‘Am I not here, for I am your mother?’ ” Juan Diego repeated to himself.
    His passenger’s bilingual mutterings caused the contentious limo driver to look at Juan Diego in the rearview mirror.
    It’s a pity Lupe wasn’t with her brother; she would have read the limo driver’s mind—she could have told Juan Diego what the hateful man’s thoughts were.
    A successful wetback, the