Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [93]
“You really need to forgive him,” Aunt Julia continued. “Blaming your father for everything that happened is only hurting you and no one else. You’re very smart, ni ma’i—niece, and a lawyer besides. Everything you learned in school should have taught you that it’s wrong to see only one side of things.”
Julia, Delia’s mother’s aunt, was the last person Delia expected to leap to Manny’s defense.
“What other side is there?” Delia shot back angrily. “It is his fault. He’s the one who beat my mother up. I saw him do it. If it’s not his fault, whose is it, my mother’s?”
“No,” Julia said. “It wasn’t Ellie’s fault, either. She was too young to know what was what.”
“Whose, then?” Delia persisted.
“If you want someone to blame,” Aunt Julia said, “you should probably look to your grandmother, to my sister Guadalupe.”
“Come on,” Delia objected. “She died so long ago, I don’t even remember her. How could you blame any of this on her?”
“Guadalupe knew what your mother was like. We all did, from the time she was little. It was wrong of my sister to arrange a marriage with Manny. Girls like that don’t make good wives.”
“Girls like what?” Delia demanded. “You mean girls like me—ones who are smart the way my mother was or who want to go to school to better themselves?”
“No,” Aunt Julia said softly. “I mean girls who like girls.”
That conversation had proved to be a watershed for Delia Cachora. For the first time she could see that the tragedy of her father’s life wasn’t so different from her own. Manny had married Ellie Francisco expecting one thing and had gotten another in the same way Delia’s marriage to Philip had turned out to be far different from her own expectations.
From then on, Delia was able to be kinder to her father and far more patient in her dealings with him. Eventually she was able to forgive both her parents for the unwitting mistakes they had made along the way. She never forgave Philip, though. Unlike Manny Chavez and Ellie Francisco when they married, Philip Cachora had known exactly what he was doing.
Twenty
But even with all the Indian mother’s care, her baby seemed to grow smaller and smaller. When the cold days came, she slept more and more and smiled less often. And the mother, in those days, never smiled at all. She was afraid.
Then one morning, the parents found that their baby was not breathing.
So the mother wrapped the little one in her brightest blankets. And the father called for his neighbors to help him. The parents and their friends carried the baby to the mountains, where the dead are put in their rock homes.
They did not need much brush or many stones to cover such a little thing.
Now a good Indian does not show how he feels. Especially if one is sad, it must not be shown. Great Spirit—I’itoi—who is the Spirit of Goodness and Elder Brother of the Tohono O’odham—manages everything. So to feel very bad about anything is to oppose the Spirit of Goodness.
But this mother had eaten nothing all that day. In her throat there was something big and hard which she could not swallow. As she went up the mountain with her friends, she kept stumbling. And this worried her husband. He was afraid she would let the water come in her eyes.
PeeWee had gone home and Brian was at his desk trying to sort through his impressions of the LaGrange interview when his phone rang. “Brian? Glad you answered the phone.”
Alvin Miller wasn’t a great one for using proper titles, and Brian recognized his voice. “What’s up?”
“AFIS just got a hit on one of the prints from yesterday’s crime scene. I can fax it up to you or—”
“Hold on,” Brian said. “I’ll be right there.”
He wasn’t right there. The elevator took forever. “What have you got?” he asked as soon as Sally Carmichael unlocked the lab door for him to enter. “Is it the victim? Do we have a name?”
“Slow down,” Alvin said. “One thing at a time. I’ve requested detailed information on the case in question. It should arrive in the next several minutes. AFIS only sends out an abbreviated version, but from what I’ve learned