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lives here, too.”
    “What does he do?” I asked. “Live in the woods?”
    “He is the woods. He’s one of those pagan things the church spent a lot of time stamping out, and then they just gave up and turned him into the harvest festival.”
    Around here there are lots of overlapping layers of belief like that. This time of year, the people from Mexico go to the cemeteries right after Halloween and clean up the graves and put marigolds and candles on them, then they have a picnic and tell their ancestors the news. They call it El Dia de los Muertos , the Day of the Dead. The church calendar calls it All Souls Day. Grandpa Joe says it’s because the Aztecs believed death and life were really part of the same thing, and that this is the time of the year when the borders between the worlds are thin. The Church adapted that, the same way it made room for Easter eggs and Christmas trees. People make altars on the Day of the Dead, and put all the stuff their dead relatives liked to eat and drink on them. They make skeleton decorations and dress them up, and if you’re a little kid you get a sugar skull with your name on it, just like you would a chocolate Easter egg.
    “Got a date for Homecoming?” Jesse asked me, smoothing a leaf onto the Green Man’s nose. Homecoming is on Halloween weekend.
    “Nah. I’m too weird.”
    “You aren’t weird,” he said encouragingly. “You’re artsy.”
    “Are you gonna go?” It was nice that he thought I was artsy.
    “Can’t dance,” he said. “And I’m weirder than you are.”
    “I guess I could go with Lily,” I said. “Lots of girls go stag. But that felt kind of stupid in middle school, so I think it would feel double stupid here.”
    “And you’re too old to trick-or-treat.” He shook his head and looked sympathetic.
    “Yeah. Lily and I went last year, but we got a lot of dirty looks.”
    “Want to come with me, to take my little brother and sister?”
    “Is this the booby prize? Are you feeling sorry for me?” I asked.
    “Nope. I just don’t want to take the little monsters by myself.”
    “Are you going to wear a costume?”
    “No, but you can.”
    I grinned at him. “What kind of get-up would embarrass you the most?”
    “Can’t embarrass me.” Jesse looked like he was daring me to try.
    “Can Lily come too?” It wasn’t fair to abandon her on Halloween.
    “Reindeer? Sure.”

5
    I spent some time trying to think up a good costume, and finally settled on La Llorona, who is a famous weeping woman in Mexican folklore. She wears a long black dress and mantilla, and drowned either her children or her husband in the river. Every night she goes back to the river, and either looks for them or drowns them again. There are a lot of variants in folklore.
    “ ‘Long Black Veil,’ very cool,” Jesse said when we knocked on his door, adding yet another variant to the possibilities. Lily had on reindeer antlers. “This is Angie and Rudolph, guys,” he said to the two little kids who were waiting with their plastic pumpkins. “Angie and Lily, this is my mom and dad.”
    His parents shook hands with us very formally and his mom smiled. “It’s nice of you to help Jesse take the little ones out.” She tugged at Jesse’s pant leg where it was bunched over the artificial leg. “You won’t walk too far?”
    “He’ll be fine,” his dad said. “He’s supposed to walk.”
    His mom shot him a look. “In your judgment. Which I have learned not to trust as blindly as I used to.”
    “Come on, guys.” Jesse shooed the little ones out the door. They had masks on but I assumed Batman was his brother and the princess with the wings was his sister. “I hate it when they do that,” he said.
    Lily gave him an appraising look. I’d told her what Mom had said about Jesse’s dad signing him up. “Are you the oldest?”
    “Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “They had a kid after me, but he had one of those genetic diseases and he died when he was a