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(I had to remind myself), was already seated in the center of the front row; their son, Leon Jr., and Leon’s family around him. He was a handsome old man, had to have broken hearts when he was at Texas A&M, just like his son, my half brother, Leon Jr., had during the year he spent in College Station, playing football, skipping classes, and finally dropping out. Leon Jr. looked just like him, a tall, light-eyed Texan, brushing back his short hair.The boy had gone into the army, and I hadn’t seen him since he was very young. Little Leon, we called him. He had our mother’s eyelashes, but little else we could find. Old Leon saw us standing back, waved, calling us to his side. The minister, bespectacled, middle-aged, his face deeply lined beyond his years, approached us, clasping a Bible in his right hand. He spoke softly, his eyes clouded behind his glasses. He said, Come to the front row, it’s for family. We nodded but said nothing. He took me by the elbow, gently. I shook my head. Then, knowing that mother would have ordered us to the front row, I smiled, thinking she would under- stand, and said, Thank you, but we prefer to stand back here.
    Prayers were said, and the sun beat hard on my back and the soil lost its morning dampness and was now dry red, the fields around us barren.
    Tití Angela Luisa stood bravely in the heat, in black, her eyes behind sunglasses. My aunt had seen her father buried, her mother buried, her husband buried. Now, her only sister. They began to lower the coffin.We turned our backs at that moment.
    Amaury reached for my hand. He looked younger and taller in a suit, a handkerchief folded in the pocket of his jacket, his face shaven,

    his mustache clipped, his dark hair combed back. His sunglasses con- cealed his swollen eyes. He had cried all through the service in church, his shoulders shaking.The girls had cried; everyone had cried but Angeles and me.
    I thought, If I cry, if Angeles cries, who would be there for the others?
    The burial service seemed very fast. We walked away before the coffin had completely gone into the ground, and we separated to get into our cars.We rode, as in a caravan, to the church hall, where the ladies had prepared a lunch for the entire crowd.
    Angeles and I didn’t go in for a long time. We stood outside, smoking under the threshold, reviewing the service as if it had been a theater play, trying to see it as my mother would have. She would have liked it, I repeated.
    Relatives of my mother’s husband came by, cousins, nephews, aunts, everyone. We smiled, we thanked them, but we could hardly remember any of them.
    What are we doing here? Angeles asked me, asking herself.What is this, a lunch after a burial? We laughed. Sara came to get us, some- one came to get us, and we went inside.
    Tables had been set up, as if this were a dinner party. The six of us didn’t sit at the table the ladies had for us. This had been my mother’s church group, and she and her husband ate lunch there every Sunday after services. My mother, incredibly, had become a churchgoer in her old age, she whom I had rarely seen in a Catholic church when I was growing up. She had become a Methodist like Leon when she remarried, and lately had been reading that booklet of prayers I saw on her bedside table.
    We didn’t stand and wait to serve ourselves from the buffet. We sat in a corner by a window and took pictures of one another with Olga’s camera and acted exactly like my mother would have prohib-

    ited, like outsiders, like the private club we had suddenly become. Orphans against the world.
    Olga was beside herself, one moment sobbing uncontrollably, the next laughing just as hard, and crying out, Mother, mother is gone. She held on to Angeles, bending as if the pain were centered in her stomach, as if the life inside her were leaving.What am I going to do without her? And suddenly shifting moods, she started taking pic- tures. Amaury had his arm around me. He grew up years that