Finnegan's week

CHAPTER 28

The next day, El Día de los Muertos, the mother of the thief, Pepe Palmera, honored his memory at the graveyard. She brought flowers, and a photo of him that she’d put inside a cheap pewter frame. She gazed at his photo for a long time that day.

The mother of Porfirio Velásquez Saavedra, a.k.a. Juan Soltero, spent the day praying on her knees to the Virgin of Guadalupe while a mortician negotiated with family members for the price of a splendid funeral, as befitting his position.

Abel Durazo’s mother did not put out a bottle of beer or anything else for her son’s ghost. She was so shocked and grief-stricken to have learned of his murder that she was disconsolate, and refused to leave her bedroom.

The mother of Jaime Cisneros baked some sweet breads for her lost little boy. Also, she put out a few of his favorite toys, along with his asthma inhaler, even though her husband said that it seemed foolish to leave an inhaler for their dead son. Jaime’s twelve-year-old sister, Socorro, swore that she saw Jaime that night, walking along the path that leads from Colonia Libertad to the north, and crawling through the hole in the fence like thousands before him.