Ramona remembered when her mother had died of a strange illness that had caused her arms and legs to go numb, a numbness that spread rapidly to her heart. Ramona had stood in the Guadalupe graveyard and looked at her grieving father and her brother Flavio, who was eleven with the mind of a tree, and at her baby brother, José, who although three years old could only walk backward. Ramona, at nineteen, could suddenly see the rest of her life. That night she packed a small suitcase, and the following morning, she left town on the bus that stopped every day at Felix’s Café. Thirteen years later, after the death of her grandfather, Ramona had returned to Guadalupe on what she could swear was the same bus.
Flavio pulled off the highway just past Felix’s Café and turned onto a gravel road that followed the creek as it wound through the valley. He drove past his fields and saw how green the alfalfa had become with just the morning rain. He hoped it would rain forever, or at least until it was time for him to cut the fields one last time before autumn. After a mile or so, he turned off the road onto his drive, long and narrow and thickly lined with apple trees.
The house had been their father’s, and it was where Flavio and Ramona and José Sr. had spent their childhood. Their father had built it with his own hands early in his marriage. After his death, Flavio had waited a brief time and then moved into the house, giving his brother a great deal of the furniture and a beige cast-iron cookstove that at this moment was rusting in the rain behind José’s trailer. To Ramona, he had given their mother’s wedding ring and the chickens and turkeys that had lived in a shed behind the house.
After the death of their mother and after Ramona’s departure from Guadalupe, their father, who had always liked the taste of whiskey, began drinking in earnest. Blessed with a strong body and a mind that stayed calm even on windy days, he was able to consume vast amounts of alcohol and still hold his job at the copper mine. Flavio remembered his father during those years in much the way that one remembers a wall. Five years after Ramona returned to Guadalupe, their father dropped dead in Tito’s bar one afternoon while reaching into his pocket for change. The medical examiner in Las Sombras told Ramona and Flavio and José Sr. that their father’s heart had shrunk to the size of a large marble and was the color of old snow. The burial of her father eight years ago was the last funeral Ramona had attended, and at least, Ramona thought, her father had had the decency not to sit up in his coffin and converse with her.
The wake for Loretta and José was being held at the home of Loretta’s parents, so the only vehicles in Flavio’s drive were his wife’s car and, beside it, Ramona’s pickup. Flavio pulled in next to the truck and parked. He shut off the engine and sat listening to the sound of the rain on the cab. He hoped that the tar he had spread around the base of his stovepipe last spring was keeping out the water. He looked over at Ramona and cleared his throat. When Ramona looked back at him, Flavio could suddenly see that his sister was aging. Lines like feathers branched away from her eyes, and there may have been more gray than black in her hair. Her eyes were red with a darkness below them, and Flavio was reminded of his mother when she would lie ill in bed and hold her arms out to him. She would say softly, “Mi hijo, come here to me.” Flavio suddenly felt sad again, and when Ramona spoke, the sound of her voice startled him.
“Flavio,” she said.
“Yes,” Flavio said too loudly.
“Is little José here, or is he at his abuela’s?”
“José is in the house,” Flavio said. “We’re to go over to Loretta’s family.”
Ramona grunted. She pushed the truck door open, climbed out of the cab, and with long strides walked to the house. Flavio sat in the pickup for a moment watching his sister, and then he got out and trudged after her through the mud.
Flavio’s wife, Martha, was in her kitchen wrapping the tortillas she had made in a warm towel. She had begun cooking the moment she received news of Loretta and José’s death. On the counter about her were platters of enchiladas in a sauce of thick red chile. Stacks of pork tamales that she had wrapped in cornhusks. Posole and menudo and chicharrónes. There was a bowl the size of a basin full to the brim with salsa with so much cilantro in it that it was the first thing Ramona smelled when she entered the house. José was standing at the side of the sink, cutting garlic that Martha would sprinkle over the enchiladas, when Ramona walked into the kitchen.
“Hello Martha,” Ramona said. “Hello José.”
Martha was a small, round woman who was at a loss as to what to say to nearly everyone. She knew she was this way because of her mother, who was also small and round, but who had been born mute and so never said anything to anyone. Martha had adored her sister-in-law, Loretta, for the simple reason that Loretta could talk and talk without any need of a response. When the two of them were together, Martha spoke only to prod Loretta into another long monologue, and then she would go on with what she was doing and listen to her sister-in-law as if the words Loretta spoke were woven with poetry. With Ramona, it was different. Ramona seldom spoke, and the silences that fell between them made Martha constantly uncomfortable in Ramona’s presence. Oddly enough, Ramona had always admired Martha and often wondered how her brother had come to marry a wife who cooked so well and kept the house neat and was never angry. When Martha saw Ramona enter the kitchen, she prayed that her husband would come soon.
“It rained,” Martha said, laying more tortillas on a towel.
“Yes,” Ramona said. “The mud was everywhere.” José had stopped what he was doing and was staring at her. Ramona could see Loretta’s wide eyes in his face and the darkness of his skin that had come from the Montoyas. “José,” she said softly, reaching out to touch his shoulder, “please go get your coat.” When he had left the room, she turned to Martha.
“Loretta spoke with me once, and she told me that if anything ever happened to her and my brother, I was to take little José.”
Martha turned to Ramona and felt that her mouth had opened. She closed it and tried to smile. She heard the front door open and the sound of her husband’s boots coming toward the kitchen.
Flavio walked through the living room and came a few steps into the kitchen. “Flavio,” Martha said, “Ramona is here.”
“Of course Ramona is here,” he said. “She came with me.” He felt awkward and irritable. He wished his sister would leave so he could feel comfortable in his own house. “Are you ready to go?” he asked his wife. “Yes,” Martha said, “in a moment,” and she went to the stove and took two towels from the oven that she had placed there to warm. She went back to the counter and draped the towels over the three stacks of tortillas.
“José,” Flavio yelled. “Get your coat. It is almost time to go.”
“Are his things here?” Ramona asked her sister-in-law.
Martha realized there were two different conversations going on among three people about the same thing. She thought, not for the first time, how fortunate her mother was merely to listen good-naturedly and not be placed in such positions.
“There’s a bag in the living room,” Martha said to Ramona. “Everything else is still in the trailer.”
Ramona turned her head toward Flavio. “Maybe tomorrow you can bring the rest of his things.”
Flavio had no idea what his sister was talking about. It wasn’t until the front door closed a few minutes later that his wife told him Ramona had taken little José.
Neither Ramona nor José said a word as Ramona drove back to her house. José watched the rain and thought of the time when he was very little and had been outside his house during a lightning storm. His father had burst from the trailer and had grabbed him roughly around the waist and carried him inside. When his father put him down, he hit José hard on the butt and, with his face twisted in anger and fear, told his son to never again be outside during a lightning storm. There was evil in it. It would mess around all day up high, but when you weren’t looking—and