Brown sat off to the side, an outsider. Not family, not friend. Not Catholic. In the packed assembly, gathered together to celebrate a life, to mourn a death, he felt alone.

“I asked him, once. All he would say was, ‘I kept faith.’”

“You're the one who tries to understand people. I just try to make sense of easy things, like product substitution and elasticity of demand in the new states of Southeast Asia.”

“We offer truth, not justice. And I rather doubt the sky’s going to fall.”

Sometimes, a minute’s worth a lifetime.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

– William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Of course I wanted it all – a fun career and friends and a husband and a family and no trade-offs ever. . . . When I discovered I was pregnant, though, I found out life isn’t like that. That I had to make choices, and a lot of them were hard. One of them, though . . . . One of them was easy. I chose you.”

“That’s wonderful, Querida,” Lourdes said, pausing just long enough to give me a radiant smile. “Such a relief! And now . . . now you will have something to celebrate!”

“Maybe,” I said to the girl in the mirror. “Just maybe – you’ll do, Carmen.”

Padre’s story, and momma’s – and mine, and Ximo’s, and Domingo’s – were all intertwined with the man sitting across the table. Did I want to know his side of it? Could I trust anything he said?

Yolanda’s smile was legend. It was sunshine and rainbows, sure, but it was sword and shield too. Sometimes it came easy; other times it required determination and grit.

My mind whirled into a chaotic reverse; it felt like our lunch, and my trip out to Kern Cotton, had taken place a month earlier. I had to remind myself that it had only been yesterday. . . .

“There’s a man out there, right now,” Braddock said softly, pointing generally in the direction of outside. “A man who’s responsible for her being in your hospital today. Out there, on the run. We need her help to find him, before he hurts someone else.”

“ . . . if I measure myself against AJ, I might call myself a failure, just like you’re doing right now. That wouldn’t be fair, and more importantly, it wouldn’t be true. We’ve had our own struggles, just to get where we are.”

“Some members of the family, maybe, might be sad to see me go. But the family as a unit? As some sort of community?” I shook my head. “It’s like I’ve knocked over a beehive or something.”

Her dark eyes were thoughtful, weighing my words. “Maybe it needed to be knocked over.”

“For all his flaws – and for all of mine – I’d just like to have my father back. Maybe now, after all these years, we can do better.”

Others might see them as simple, working-class folks, but they had been the powers of my very small world when I was growing up. And here they were, assembled together, looking for all the world like some kind of family court.

The deep pain flared like shrapnel from an old battle, hard and sharp and deadly. The hot words straight from padre’s mouth — “I have no daughter!” And the cold ones, a year later, by his hand. “It is my specific desire and intent to disinherit . . . .”