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girl was crazy. But this child was not aware of how the others had made her a laughingstock, nor the pain and humiliation she had inflicted upon her poor parents.” He sipped his beer. “Anyway, she was always inside a dream and never looked where she was going. One day, at least as the story goes, the girl took a long walk and as she walked, she sang and hummed. She came to some train tracks and laid her legs across the tracks, singing and looking at the sky. Too busy in her dream, she did not hear the train. The train driver honked, but the girl would not look up, and trains cannot be stopped once they are in motion. The train ran right over her legs and cut them both off right to about here.” He indicated his hip. “Yes, Keesy, do not look so shocked. Her legs were severed and left in the middle of the tracks for the buzzards. And the poor child—to the great sorrow of her mother and father—was left with two bloody stumps.”
    “Louie, that’s a terrible story!” Mommy said. “You don’t tell stories like that to a child!”
    “What happened to her after that, Poppa? What happened?”
    “Your mother is right; it is a difficult story. If I were to tell you more, you might have nightmares.”
    The waiter came and took the empty bottles of Heineken and gave my father a fresh beer. I couldn’t stop thinking of those two bloody stumps left on the track. “Poppa, please! You can’t tell a story without telling the ending!”
    “You have a good imagination. You make the ending for yourself, Keesy.”
    “You’re drunk, Louie! You are just drunk and it’s ninety degrees! It is ninety degrees! You could have a sunstroke!” my mother said in a whisper-yell; she was aware of how angry he would get if he was publicly humiliated. “There’s a pay phone in there. I’m calling Dr. Gurney. I’m telling him what you do to frighten Margaux!”
    “You do that! I will give you the quarter myself!” He reached into his pocket. “Here is some change; call him! Maybe I can have a break then! I can sit here and enjoy the shade! Go!”
    When my mother left the table, I put my hands gently around the metal pole holding the large sun umbrella in place over our heads. I felt safer holding it.
    “That woman is comical. The heat gets to her. What does she think? That it is wrong to have some cold beer on a hot day? That woman is crazy. On a hot day, I don’t like to fight. I like to sit in the shade and enjoy a cold beer under a big umbrella. She acts as though I like hot weather. I despise the heat and humidity! That is why I left Puerto Rico! I came here to escape. But then I found that woman.”
    “Poppa, tell the rest.”
    “Well,” he said, and I stared at his auburn beard and thought of a beetle I had squashed recently, to see what color its blood was. The blood had been orange and had smelled bad; I’d been surprised that its blood wasn’t red. He went on: “No one really knows. There are two versions. One version is that she stayed with her mother and father caring for her in bed until she grew old and died. The second version is that one night she prayed to the devil to get her legs back. She had been praying to God and he never responded. So, legend goes, her mother opened the door to her bedroom one day, and she was missing, never to be seen again. But sometimes the mother thought she heard on the roof a strange tapping sound that wasn’t rain or branches hitting the tar paper, it sounded like feet. And some have said, though you can never be sure, for children tell lies, but some of the children of my great-grandfather’s time have said that at night, they have seen the girl with a great horned beast on top of the roof that they assumed must be the devil himself. They were dancing together!” He paused to drink some beer, and continued. “Now, I myself do not know what to believe. The first version is a little more plausible. But the second version could also be true.”
    I looked miserably into my