Silvestre Morales’s portrait went up crooked.
Remedios straightened it once, then again. The cardboard had warped over the years and would not stay against the whitewashed brick, even with two pins. In the photograph, Silvestre posed in an oversized jacket, chin raised as though he had been caught just as he was about to object to something. He had vanished seven years earlier. No one in San Isidro had seen him dead.
That was precisely the problem.
“Put him with the missing,” Remedios said.
Clara, her daughter, remained on the stepladder with the portrait in her hands.
“Doña Natividad brought him for the altar.”
“I know where he came from.”
“She brought bread too.”
“The bread can stay.”
At thirteen, Clara already had the family women’s way of looking at them when she thought they were complicating a simple matter. She climbed down without answering. In the front room, the walls held the afternoon heat. The cempasúchil petals had begun to lose their stiffness on the plates. A cut orange released a fresh scent among wax, sugar, and plaster. Remedios took Silvestre’s portrait and set it on the small table by the window, where things accumulated that had not yet found their place: a medal without a name, two purple ribbons, a child’s photograph with only *to my sister* written on the back, and a pair of round glasses that no longer belonged to anyone.
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