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go to the public midden shed down the line.
    His sister was busy in the kitchen—a small, dark corner at the other end of the living room. His nephews met him and they were all hands at the comics section of the afternoon paper and a bag of peanuts that he had bought.
    “I’ve prepared something special for you,” Betty called out from the kitchen. She turned away from the kerosene stove. She was a short, anemic-looking woman with deep-set eyes and thin lips. She had always been frail, and motherhood, as it had happened with many women, should have endowed her with more flesh, but she was thinner than ever. Her voice, however, had a certain warmth and fullness that somehow made up for her meager frame. “I remember your letters and how you used to crave for
pinakbet
‖ with broiled mudfish. Well, the mudfish—I stopped by the market this afternoon—”
    “Thank you, Manang,” he said. He stood beside her, opened the earthen pot, and the heady smell of eggplants, bitter melons, onions, tomatoes, and mudfish in stew whorled up to him. For a while he let the luxurious aroma engulf him, then he placed the lid back on the bubbling pot.
    “I do wish you’d eat more,” Tony said, looking at his sister. She was indeed thin, and now, in the yellow light, she seemed even thinner. But Betty was not pallid in body or spirit, for each muscle in her taut frame was toughened by hard physical work—washing and housecleaning—and by the work in the fields when she was younger.
    “How is Father?” Betty asked after a while.
    “He is all right, but he thinks he hasn’t long to live,” Tony said. “When was it that you saw him last? He wants to see the children.”
    “The children,” Betty sighed. “Tony, you know the children can’t know about their grandfather—it is for the best.”
    “Yes,” Tony said quietly.
    “They will not understand. No one in this street will understand.”
    Tony didn’t speak.
    “I wish Father would understand,” Betty was saying, “but he seems unchangeable. I can’t do much for him. I never did much for him. Six years you were away, maybe I saw him only twice a year.”
    Tony quickly veered away from the nettlesome subject. “Where is Manong?” he asked.
    “Upstairs. Go ask him to come down,” Betty said, laying the chipped china on the table beyond the stove. “He likes pinakbet, too.”
    Tony climbed the narrow stairs dusty with afternoon, to the room that faced the street. Bert, his brother-in-law, was there, plucking hair from his armpits and grimacing properly before the cracked glass of the
aparador.
a
    “We are having
pinakbet
this evening,” Tony said.
    Bert grunted. He was short like his wife, but massively built, and his short-cropped hair accentuated the shortness of his neck and the squareness of his chin. He was Ilocano, too, with thick lips and deep brown skin. While he clerked for a Chinese flour importer in Binondo district, he studied law at night. He followed Tony down the darkened stairway, his steps heavy.
    Betty’s boys were already at the table, noisy as pigs, and the maid darted about, attending to their every whim.
    Tony had never discussed the subject of marriage before with his sister, although they had touched on its fringes in the past, bantering about the girls in Rosales who had shown him inordinate attention. And remembering Rosales, thoughts of his cousin Emy thrust themselves once more on his consciousness. She had been with him in this very house, studying to be a teacher because that seemed to be the cheapest course for her to take, although it was not the limit of her talent.
    He wondered how his sister would react to what he had to say. No, he was not shirking his responsibility of sending her children to school in gratitude for the assistance she had given him. There wouldbe no shirking—the duty was his, he being a younger brother, and it was as natural as birth itself.
    “Manang,” he started, searching Betty’s face for a sign of