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would arrive from work, walking from the bus stop, a newspaper in her hand, her heels click- ing on the pavement. Angeles and I would run to her and hold her around her waist. With a cup of coffee and the newspaper folded beside her, she would sit on the porch with us, holding us to her lap, humming to us, her voice a breeze in my ear, Ese lunar que tienes, cielito lindo, junto a la boca, no se lo des a nadie, cielito lindo, que a mí me toca.

    Chapter Two

    Amor de Loca Juventud

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    n the eve of my mother’s funeral I thought I would sleep, but sleep didn’t come. My sisters and I had booked rooms in the town’s only motel—it was too far to go back to Sara’s in Dallas for the night, and my mother’s house was crowded, with Angeles and Amaury staying there. It was an ordinary roadside motel, a truck stop where coffee came gritty and lukewarm out of a machine and long-haul drivers gassed up their trucks and stayed on for a couple of beers. I had a room alone, as I wanted it. No conversation, no crying, only silence. Well, not entirely. The old air-conditioning unit rattled, the occasional souped-up car roared out of the drive- way, and murmurs came through the walls. I read the local papers. I leafed through a magazine. I turned on the TV and clicked it off, startled that the world was still going on, Jay Leno laughing, his cackle breaking through the impermeable quiet I was trying to
    build around myself. I turned off the lights.
    In the dark, I saw my mother in her short, red velvety robe, the one still hanging on the back of the door of her bathroom; I saw her going to the kitchen and drinking a glass of milk before bedtime, and I saw that house of hers, with the tall trees and the garden she tried to plant, where her piano stood like a prized trophy against a living room wall. I saw her china espresso cups shining among the old dishes in her cupboards. They were a gift from Angeles, and mother

    had wrapped them in newspapers and carried them from one coun- try to another. She kept the cups for a long-anticipated moment, an evening of great conversation and poetry and piano-playing, where she would serve espresso to convivial company, but that had not hap- pened to her in those last years. So little had.
    The funeral was the next day, on a Monday, at noon.
    It was the first time that the six of us had been together in one place in more than fifteen years. We all sat together in the second pew, dressed up as she would have liked.We were all in black—a row of black, a row of lost faces.
    The church was draped in red. Red carnations, big crimson-and- white wreaths placed around and on her coffin. The stained-glass windows seemed red, which caused the sunlight to stream through in red, like a spotlight. She liked red, and she liked black. I can hardly remember her in blue or green, but she was a tropical woman, she liked her plumage.
    We held hands, Angeles on one side of me, Amaury on the other. We stood to pray, and we sat quietly, heads bowed, to listen to some- one play “Für Elise,” the music she had played on her piano. We lis- tened to the eulogies, soft words about a woman, a good woman, but someone I didn’t recognize as my mother, and when we filed out, when they played the “Ave Maria” on the pipe organ, I thought I might cry.
    I turned to Angeles and said, She would’ve liked it. Yes, all the people who came, Angeles said.

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    green awning with wide white stripes shaded the chairs that lined up in front of the hole where her coffin would lie. A gravestone had been made, her name—no, not her name, but the name she took when she remarried—had been chiseled into gray

    marble. The years, 1918–1994. In quotes, Flor de Borínquen. A poem had been written for her in her youth called “Flor de Borín- quen,” and she had kept it. Borínquen, the tribal name for Puerto Rico. Meaningless and sad in this clay that wasn’t hers.
    We stood behind the rows of chairs. Leon, my mother’s husband