CHAPTER 6

MY COUSIN PAULI, Caridad’s younger sister, never thought Jimmy was a potential serial killer, the way Nena had. Nor did she think he was a petty hustier, like I originally envisioned. Pauli didn’t even think he was a comemierda, as Tío Pepe always described him. For Pauli, he was simply Jimmy Frankenstein (pronounced Frankhen-ess-tein, since life in Mexico produced a sudden accent in Pauli’s English), but her reference was not to the hapless monster, whom she regarded as an innocent, but to the scientist, the evil Victor who pieced together cadavers and animated them in his own earthly hell. As far as Pauli was concerned, Jimmy had found a way to kill Caridad and then bring her back in his own distorted image, compliant and anesthetized.

“You guys don’t notice because you’re around her all the time and change is so slow, so tiny, that it’s hard to see,” Pauli said when she arrived from Mexico for Caridad and Jimmy’s wedding. She’d just started working at the Mexican rock club and the family was still in shock. “But I haven’t seen her in almost eight months—I mean, I can really tell—and I’m telling you, that’s a zombie, that’s not my sister in there.”

Pauli nodded in the direction of her parents’ house, from which Patricia, Nena and I had just rescued her. After spending a chaotic afternoon with Caridad and her parents, all of whom were trying desperately to get her to quit her go-go dancing job and come home, Pauli wanted dinner somewhere “away from everything, por favor” with just the girl cousins.

“I’m telling you, man, something’s wrong,” she said climbing into Patricia’s VW Rabbit (which Patricia and her American Jewish husband, Ira, insist was built by American workers in Philadelphia, not Germany). “That Jimmy Frankenstein has done something to my sister. He’s drilled holes in her head, he’s poured chemicals in her brain.” Pauli and I were squeezed so miserably into the back of that VW that she refused to go home with us after dinner, opting to take a cab back to her parents’ house instead.

Even Patricia, who prides herself on her ability to see the family from a measured and civilized distance (she’s a political science professor at the University of Illinois who uses her mental health benefits for therapy twice a week), didn’t exactly disagree with Pauli’s assessment of Caridad. Although we might not have had the benefit of Pauli’s distance, among the cousins we’d all commented on the changes in Caridad.

“I think it’s a few things,” Patricia said as she maneuvered the VW into a spot in front of the restaurant, a pizza parlor with thick-stuffed pies that Pauli adores and the rest of us hate. “One, I think, it’s timing: after so many years—I mean, Caridad’s thirty and, feminism and all that aside, the fact is she’s still living at home and probably just got lazy—and, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, Jimmy does love her. Two, there’s something disgustingly Cuban about him, and I think, in a way, that appeals to her, like a primordial memory.”

When she said this, we laughed aloud. The concept was typical Patricia: She always sees a connection to Cuba. “No, really, think about it,” she insisted. She shut off the ignition and turned to face us. “Cari came to the U.S. when she was—what, seventeen?—right smack in the middle of her prime, as far as Cubans are concerned. Just as she was at the age to have formal relationships, she was dropped into the barrio, where everything was scary and she didn’t know English, and the men were all potentially dangerous. Don’t you remember how Tía Celia would always tell you guys not to get on CTA buses if it was only you and the driver because he could be a rapist?”

We all laughed again, perhaps even louder. Certainly, we had all been overprotected girls: Every one of us had had a chaperon on our first date, all of us had gone out in groups for years, and it was only recently that any of us had dated Americans (except Patricia, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. before the revolution and always had different ideas about everything).

“Your father hates Jimmy,” Nena told Pauli as we crawled out of Patricia’s VW and headed for the pizza parlor.

“I know,” Pauli said, smiling. It was a cool night in the city, with just enough moisture in the air to make everything shiny.

Nena and I looked at each other. Pauli seemed uncharacteristically smug.

“It’s really killing him,” she said. “The wedding’s killing him more than I’m killing him, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened.”

All our lives, Pauli had been Tío Pepe’s pearl and headache—something to marvel at, with her snappy wit and flexible limbs, but also something to fear in many ways. When she got mad, she didn’t yell like the rest of us, just shut down cold; we used to call her the Fortress of Solitude. With her straight A’s and cool temper, Pauli was often unpredictable to us, especially to our parents.

Caridad, by contrast, was Tío Pepe’s comfort. If Pauli annoyed him with the long line of tough admirers she always attracted and the troubles they caused, Caridad assuaged him by asking his opinion of the men in her life, seeking his advice for her problems and often having dinner out with him. We’d see Tío Pepe and Caridad out by themselves for a bite at Maria’s Kitchen, Tío Pepe laughing and relaxed, proud and cocky. He’d raise his drink and wave through the window whenever any of us drove by and honked. Caridad didn’t mind his drunkenness, and she seemed not to notice his infidelities.

Pauli, though, was a whole other ball game. There’s a story the cousins tell among ourselves (except around Caridad) about Pauli when she was about twelve, just as she first realized her father was a philanderer. She and Tía Celia were out running a few errands when they saw Tío Pepe across the street, flirting shamelessly with another woman. (“A saucy, red-haired woman,” Patricia always says when it’s her turn to tell it.) Tía Celia didn’t say anything, of course, just endured, biting her trembling lower lip and taking deep breaths all the way home. Pauli, though, understood everything: her mother’s pain, her father’s indiscretion, her own humiliation.

Later that same afternoon, Pauli tracked down Tío Pepe’s mistress at the counter of the Busy Bee, an old Polish diner at the corner of North, Milwaukee and Damen. But instead of trying to appeal to the woman’s better sentiments by explaining Tía Celia’s dismay, or even her own anger, Pauli—never letting on that she was Tío Pepe’s daughter, not just some street urchin—told the woman she’d been looking for him to no avail.

“Do you think you’re gonna see him later?” Pauli asked her. She spun mischievously on a stool as she spoke, a small paper bag in her hand. “I’ve looked all over and I just can’t find him.” She gripped the bag with white knuckles, glancing at it now and then, underscoring its mystery and importance with every spin on the diner’s stool.

“Who wants to know?” Tío Pepe’s mistress asked while smacking her gum and clearing some dishes from the counter. (She was a saucy, red-haired woman, all right.) Amazingly, she took Pauli’s bait hook, line and sinker: Every time the bag danced by the counter in Pauli’s girlish hands, the woman would anxiously stare at it.

Pauli shrugged and sighed. “It’s just that…” She hesitated, then looked around the smoky diner. In the corner, two uniformed cops were on break having some blood sausage soup. “I’m supposed to…no, never mind, I can’t tell you,” Pauli said, starting down off the stool. “I’m just gonna have to find him myself.” She leaned on the counter, the bag teasingly floating above its surface for just an instant.

“What, honey, what?” the woman asked. She had huge breasts which sat on the counter like loaves of bread when she bent down to talk to Pauli.

“Well, he asked me to bring this to him and…no, I can’t, he’ll get mad at me,” she said, shaking her head. As she stood up, Pauli put the paper bag on the counter to use both hands to zip up her sweat jacket.

“What’s this, huh?” asked the woman, smacking her gum as she grabbed the bag.

“Hey, give it back!” Pauli exclaimed loud enough for the cops to look up. As if on cue, the mistress peeked inside where Pauli had placed a well-labeled tube of Pucho’s herpes ointment. The woman’s eyes widened in horror and her mouth opened, an audible gasp escaping from between her cherry-red lips. Pauli grabbed the bag from her. “I told you I can’t say,” she said, indignant. “He asked me to pick it up for him at the drugstore and if he finds out I let you see, I’m in big trouble. So don’t go saying anything, okay? You understand?”

It was brilliant: Within a matter of hours, the saucy, redhaired woman confronted Tío Pepe with one sensational, screeching outburst that was heard for several blocks. People gathered across the street from the fight to watch as she threw her shoes at him. Above Polonia Furniture and all the other stores along Milwaukee Avenue, women and kids leaned out their windows to get a view of the scandal.

Although the incident didn’t stop Tío Pepe’s womanizing, it effectively ended that relationship—and it also forced him to be more discreet. No more flaunting his mistresses in the neighborhood, no more risking being seen by his family. If Pauli could think in such conspiratorial terms at twelve, it was hard to imagine what she might do as she got older.

In American terms, Pauli refused to enable her father. In Cuban terms, she was an ingrate.

When she got home from school and Tío Pepe was dead drunk, sprawled on the floor of the living room, Pauli would walk around him. She’d make herself a pot of American coffee, watch the news or MTV, do her homework—whatever she needed to do—without acknowledging her father’s body reeking of alcohol and sweat on the floor.

“I’ve tried to talk to him,” she’d say, “and he won’t listen. Well, fine. I can’t do anything to help him, but I’m sure not going to contribute.”

When Tía Celia got home from work, she’d find Tío Pepe in whatever position Pauli had left him. Sometimes he was balled up, cold or in pain; sometimes he’d spread himself out like a giant starfish. Tía Celia would help him up, direct him to the shower or the bed, make dinner and go on with her evening’s routine. But for all the attention Tía Celia gave Tío Pepe, she’d be nearly as indifferent to Pauli as her daughter had been to her father. She and Pauli would pass each other in the hallway or kitchen, kiss hello and talk briefly about the day’s events without a single mention of the bloated body on the bed or in the shower.

Caridad, however, couldn’t take what she called Pauli’s “coldness.” For Caridad, the sin lay in Pauli’s detachment, not her father’s addiction. If Caridad beat Tía Celia home, Pauli was assured a lecture and a fight—a physical fight, in which they’d push and shove each other, scream like cats, and leave little moon-shaped cuts all over each other’s wrists. All the while, Tío Pepe would continue to lie on the floor, sometimes drooling or moaning, waiting for Tía Celia to save him.

Although anxious and tired from the continuing conflict with Caridad over how to deal with their father, Pauli would try to hold up, to carry on her day at home as normally as possible. Pauli believes in routines, in small rituals. She carries a list of things to do, wears only black and gray and deep reds, and spends twenty minutes doing visualization exercises every night before she goes to bed. But for all Pauli’s efforts, the fights with Caridad eventually wore her out. Instead of coming home after school, she began avoiding Caridad and going to the library or a friend’s house; sometimes she’d just hang out at the park or at some of the neighborhood coffeehouses where the people who live above Polonia Furniture also pass the time. We’d see her through the coffeehouse windows, reading and writing, scratching things off her lists.

Of course, Pauli’s wanderings in the neighborhood led to all kinds of trouble. First, there were the boys. Pauli may have attracted little nerds with pencils in their pockets, but we never noticed them. We were too busy with the wackos and the rowdy boys. Guys twice her age would get obsessed with her and call the house hundreds of times a day. Tía Celia had to change their phone number so many times we finally just got her a personal pager (she hated it, saying it made her feel like a drug dealer, but she endured it until Pauli moved to Mexico). Boys would hang out at the laundromat from opening to closing in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, playing pinball and video games so we wouldn’t accuse them of loitering. (Nena, of course, thought this was great because Pauli made us money just by being her luminous, impossible self.)

Curiously, Pauli never gave a damn about any of these guys. Her idea of love and romance has always been particularly tragic. Put off by what she always saw as an imbalance in her parents’ marriage, she made a promise to herself never to marry, never to have their kind of relationship. So instead of commitment, Pauli looks for impact: Back then, she had affairs only with what she calls “impossible” men (and a few women). These were not married or incorrigible lovers (because Pauli’s not into hurting other women, or adding to anybody’s reputation), but people for whom having sex with her was a transgression, a triumph of desire over all else. This meant Catholic priests, Orthodox Jews (especially Chassidics), Moslems, beautiful young boys, or men so old they thought yearning was a thing of the past. Once, Pauli spent six months with an octogenarian named Mike. When he finally slipped into a coma and died, she told us it had been her longest, most satisfying relationship. In the end, Mike left her about six thousand dollars—just about all the money he had—which is what she used to go to Mexico.

For Pauli, the whole point was memory. “I just know they’ll never forget me, ever, no matter what else happens in their lives,” she told me once about her lovers. “And that way, I’ll always, always be special.” Even then I thought, she doesn’t need to do that: Who wouldn’t always remember Pauli?

I know how resourceful she can be, but I still worried. Pauli was young when she started having sex—fourteen, the earliest of all of us—and she didn’t always use birth control. She told us that kind of preparation took away from the spontaneity, the sacredness of those memorable moments.

Eventually, her after-school activities caused some trouble with the police. These were minor skirmishes—charges of loitering, disturbing the peace, nothing serious like drugs or assault—but the family as a whole felt great worry and shame. And even though Pauli held her head up, even though she asked for nothing and was possibly the best worker we ever had at the Wash-N-Dry, as she grew older the family developed an uneasiness about her. When Pauli brushed wordlessly by an intoxicated Tío Pepe at work, Mami would stare off after her and shake her head. “He is her father,” she’d say. “That should be enough to get some respect, no?” Or Tía Zenaida: “What Pauli doesn’t realize is her father’s pain, or how hard he works. The girl takes it for granted that there’s a roof over her head and food on the table every night.”

But the cousins knew whatever Tío Pepe’s grief, Pauli matched it with her own sullen soul. When she worked at the laundromat, I’d watch her sometimes as she lifted heavy boxes or hauled equipment from one place to another in complete silence: She seemed like a prisoner fulfilling a sentence. When Nena fired her—after two boys got in a fistfight over her which caused about a thousand dollars worth of damage to the Wash-N-Dry—Pauli looked her straight in the eye and nodded, saying nothing. We watched as she packed her backpack and walked out of the laundromat, wholly composed; how she strolled through the door out to Milwaukee Avenue, not once looking back at the lights bouncing off the shiny washers and dryers, not once looking back at us.

Tío Pepe suffered plenty because of Pauli. He was visibly pained by her emotional distance, by her refusal to be around the family, by the trouble she was always getting herself into. He had a sense of her perverse sexuality too, and you could just see the torment in his eyes when Pauli, who seemed to give off light after each encounter, would wander back home. But nothing—nothing—caused him as much despair as Caridad’s relationship with Jimmy.

It wasn’t just that Caridad loved Jimmy and was giving him time that might have otherwise gone to Tío Pepe. In fact, Tío Pepe had hated Jimmy on sight, before Caridad had ever laid eyes on him, back when we thought he was a mere nuisance and someone Nena might have liked. “Who’s the comemierda?”—those were Tío Pepe’s first words about Jimmy, spoken as he came in to work one night when Jimmy was sorting his laundry.

It’s not as though Jimmy didn’t try to win over Tío Pepe and the rest of us. When he and Caridad were still dating, he’d come over, his black hair slicked back and smelling of violet water, never wearing jeans or gym shoes. He’d never curse, and always bring a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer to bribe the men, especially Tío Pepe. Jimmy would be extraordinarily polite, using usted on everybody, even after we’d tell him to stop. He’d bring flowers for my Tía Celia and be quite respectful to all the cousins.

But in spite of all this, Tío Pepe never liked Jimmy. My mother said it was because Pepe knew his own kind, but she was wrong: Tío Pepe never hit anybody in his life.

And unlike Tío Pepe, Jimmy never drinks and he’s never cheated on Caridad. Jimmy’s actually rather proud of his fidelity; in fact he’s turned it into a badge of honor. “If you’re sure about your manhood,” he tells the cousins, “you don’t have to prove it all the time, you know?” Jimmy takes pride in his work as a janitor at the hospital, in his steady paycheck and small promotions. He loves that he can take care of Caridad, and he promised Tío Pepe that she’d never go without so long as he’s around.

It didn’t matter, though: Tío Pepe couldn’t stand him. He’d call him names practically to his face. “Ese tipo es un comemierda,” he’d say, sometimes dragging out cohhhhhhh-meh-mierrrrrrr-da as if it were some rotten tripe he’d pulled out of a dead dog. Jimmy would wince and pretend he didn’t hear.

Everybody laughed and said Tío Pepe just couldn’t handle the idea of his little girl finally falling in love, but Caridad wasn’t so little when she met Jimmy, and she’d certainly had other boyfriends before—even serious ones she almost married—and Tío Pepe had never just plain hated anybody the way he did Jimmy.

The day of the wedding was especially disastrous. It had been planned as a small ceremony, just family and a few friends at Saint Ita’s in Uptown, an old church with stained glass and a wondrous pre-Vatican II altar where all the Cubans in Chicago get married. As it happened, my Tío Raúl came in from New York—so the wedding became a community event. A photographer from La Raza snapped our famous uncle with Patricia in her bridesmaid dress nearly as often as he shot pictures of the groom (surprisingly handsome and happy) and bride (breathtakingly beautiful) for the paper’s society pages. Tía Celia and Tía Zenaida jumped right into the frame, as did my mother and father, but Tío Pepe, who was curiously sober as the photographer shuttered away, refused to join them.

“Perhaps,” I whispered to Pauli and Nena, “he’s discovered secret Indian roots and believes, like they do, that cameras can steal your soul.”

“That,” said Pauli in her newly accented English, “presumes he has a soul.”

“Ay, Pauli, please, don’t talk like that,” Nena said, giving Pauli’s arm a squeeze. “It gives me the creeps, okay?” Pauli laughed and nodded as if in agreement.

In the meantime, Tío Pepe, ignoring all pleas that he get in the pictures for La Raza, paced in the church vestibule, smoked cigarettes on the church steps, and shot Jimmy menacing looks, all of which Jimmy ignored and Caridad didn’t register.

Under normal circumstances, one of us would have tried to talk to Tío Pepe and figure out what he needed to play along but, frankly, we were too busy with the wedding itself. Pauli, resplendent in a white lace dress, was the smart-ass maid of honor. (It may have been the only time any of us had seen her in anything other than black, gray or deep red since she was a kid.) Nena, Jimmy’s sister Adelaida and I were bridesmaids in matching outfits. Jimmy’s American stepbrother, a lanky white boy from Indiana named Garth, was the best man. Since Jimmy didn’t really have any close friends, there were no ushers other than Pucho and Manolito.

There were maybe three hundred guests, including a few of Jimmy’s janitor colleagues from the hospital, Emilia Fernández, and Tomás Joaquín, one of our cousins from Cuba who got a visa just in time to attend. He’s a skeletal fellow with a stringy mustache on whom everything appears awkward, but Pucho lent him a suit for the occasion in which he didn’t look half-bad. A Fidel sympathizer, Tomás Joaquín insisted on pulling up his trouser leg to show off his bulging calf muscles to whomever he happened to be talking to at the time. This, he assured us, was one of the benefits of riding his bike during the “special period,” the economic crash after the Soviet Union’s subsidies to the island vanished and there was only a little fuel with which to run cars or public buses.

For Jimmy and Caridad’s wedding, the church was covered with yellow roses (in honor of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint). Mario Varona, a young fellow of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, was hired to play guitar and sing Cuban songs during the ceremony. My mother, however, was not pleased with Mario’s hiring.

“Now every picture of the wedding is going to have a Negro in it,” she said, rolling her eyes, as if Mario were actually black instead of mulato, or the only black person invited—and as if any of that mattered to anybody but her.

“Tía Xiomara, just think how white we’ll look by comparison,” Pauli told her, winking at us. My mother groaned.

As it turned out, my mother and Tío Pepe weren’t the only ones who were miserable on Cari’s wedding day. If it weren’t for the publicity for the Wash-N-Dry my father was sure would be generated by the photos in La Raza, he probably wouldn’t have cracked a smile all day either. He’d gone ahead to check how things were going at the church’s banquet hall, where the reception was scheduled to take place, and discovered that the band hired for the occasion—a group called Mercy, put together by some of Pucho’s friends—had made liberal use of duct tape to hold down its cables and cords. Papi had come back from the banquet hall pale and despairing, hoisting his pants up unnecessarily and mumbling at a little piece of duct tape stuck to his fingers.

“Mira, Juani, look at this,” he said to me, his eyes watery, his lower lip flaccid, “what should have been our future. The gods, they mock us at every turn, no?”

He turned away, sobbing. I put my arm around him and told him not to think about it anymore. I tried to get Pauli’s attention, hoping she’d tell him a funny story about life in Mexico or in some way get him out of his dark mood, but she was too busy flirting with the priest, a handsome, red-haired American named Father Sean who became utterly flustered in her presence and spoke a rather broken Spanish (learned while on a mission in Nicaragua during the Sandinista years, which we kept a secret from our parents, who would not have approved).

The night before, at the rehearsal dinner, Pauli and Father Sean (our parents all pronounced his name “Chong,” as if it were Chinese) sat side by side. A dismayed Tomás Joaquín later told us they talked and laughed until almost two in the morning outside her parents’ house (Tomás Joaquín, a chivato, as my mother would say, was staying over at their house for the wedding). Nobody heard what Pauli and Father Sean were saying during the rehearsal dinner, but we did notice that he kept blushing and covering his mouth with his palm. By the end of the night, Nena and I had bets on whether Father Sean and Pauli would beat Jimmy and Caridad to the nearest honeymoon suite.

I was still comforting Papi about the duct tape when Nena came in, totally agitated. “Has anybody seen Tío Pepe?” she asked. We all shook our heads. We were all sitting around an anteroom, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin. “Look, it’s only about ten minutes until we’re supposed to start, and I can’t find him anywhere,” she said.

“Have you checked under the chalice?” Pauli asked sarcastically. Father Sean giggled inappropriately, then caught himself and began flipping through his prayer book and notes.

“Listen, we’ve gotta find Tío Pepe, wherever he might be,” Nena said. Already Patricia was out the door, looking both ways, a woman on a mission. As Father Sean, Papi and I headed out in search for Tío Pepe, we noticed Pauli wasn’t moving. I turned around, but it was almost as if she’d read my mind.

“I’ll stay here,” she said softly. “In case he comes back, so he doesn’t find an empty room.”

We searched everywhere: Pucho and Manolito scanned the congregation from the balcony; Nena and Patricia looked for Tío Pepe at a couple of bars on the same block as Saint Ita’s; Papi and I checked out a nearby liquor store and a bodega; and Tío Raúl and Tía Zenaida, divorced but friendly, drove around the neighborhood in his rented car looking for our lost uncle. Not only was Tío Pepe not to be found, but everyone we asked claimed not to have seen him. Finally, with Caridad and Tía Celia growing more anxious by the minute, Jimmy starting to really look like Frankenstein, and the congregation whispering so loudly that it sounded like a swarm of bees had invaded Saint Ita’s, Nena took over.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said, ordering Father Sean onto the altar and Caridad onto Papi’s arm. “If Tío Pepe shows up, great, but right now our concern is going to be getting Cari married. Everybody got that?”

We all nodded as if we were trained dogs. Tío Raúl grabbed Tía Zenaida and a sobbing Tía Celia and led them up to the front of the church to signal the wedding was about to begin. Jimmy beamed; he couldn’t have been happier to be rid of Tío Pepe. We lined up accordingly and, with the first few notes of the wedding march, proceeded. Jimmy and Garth, the bridesmaids and ushers, the ring boy (Jimmy’s little nephew Fidelito) and the flower girl (his niece Yoli) filed out, and finally, Caridad, wondrous even through her worry about Tío Pepe and his whereabouts, led to the altar by my father, who held his pants up with one hand and rolled that little piece of duct tape between his fingers during the entire ceremony.

The service itself was simple but poignant. Father Sean, who kept looking up and smiling at Pauli as if there were already a secret between them, managed to get through the service in English and Spanish without major gaffes. At Caridad’s request, he included a modest verse written by Rafael, the Peruvian orphan to whom Cari sends monthly checks through Christian Charities. To everyone’s surprise, Father Sean also recited a little poem by Jimmy about how much he loved Caridad.

“You are my home” Father Sean read, concluding Jimmy’s piece.

As the words floated out, Jimmy looked intensely at Caridad, who, unable to withstand the force of his gaze, looked away. Nena and I were actually moved by the moment—Nena even got a little sniffily—until we looked over at Pauli, who was enjoying Father Sean’s attention a little too much (her dress strap had actually fallen and she made no attempt whatsoever to fix the situation, standing there teasing him). They were so obvious, and so ridiculous.

Just then there was a commotion in the back of the church. We all turned, thinking perhaps Tío Pepe had reappeared. But though Caridad swears she saw his figure going back out the door, no one else saw a thing. Later, Tomás Joaquín said he’d gotten his trouser leg caught in one of the little hooks on the pews that hold the day’s missal; he said the noise we all heard was his knee banging against the back of the bench. Apparently, he’d been trying to show his calf muscles off to another wedding guest. He had Pucho’s torn pants to prove his embarrassing story, but Cari never forgave any of us anyway, especially Nena. She was convinced we all acted too soon, that Tío Pepe had in fact come back and that he cracked when he saw the ceremony under way without him.

As it turned out, Tío Pepe disappeared for three days after the wedding. During that time, Caridad called every day from her honeymoon in Miami Beach to see if he’d returned. She was crying each time; we all knew Jimmy couldn’t have been very happy. When Tío Pepe finally re-appeared, he offered no explanations, as usual. But it was different this time. For one thing, he never spoke to Caridad or Jimmy again—not one single, solitary syllable. Caridad begged and pleaded, threw tantrums and hung off his arm, but Tío Pepe offered nothing. (As Patricia pointed out, we all suddenly understood where Pauli got her ability to turn into the Fortress of Solitude.) Eventually, Tío Pepe stopped speaking to Nena, Patricia and me, and then our parents and Tía Zenaida, and finally to Tía Celia. One day, she came home from the laundromat and found him in his pajamas, tucked into bed, a rosary tangled between his fingers. Ten months after the wedding, Tío Pepe was dead. Mami said it was his heart that broke.

It was just as well. When Pauli came up from Mexico for her father’s funeral, she shocked everyone by bringing along her baby daughter, Rosa—a luscious little brown thing with no resemblance whatsoever to Father Sean. Of course, she refused to name the father. If Tío Pepe hadn’t already been dead, the sight of Pauli bare breasted and nursing the fatherless baby at the funeral home would have certainly been enough to kill him.