A year or so before she died, Rachel bumped her head and opened a cut above which eye. She was about eighty-five. Her skin was so thin by then that the doctor had a hard time stitching it up. It was like trying to sew tissue paper. We were going west on Katy when my mother told me this.  

Katy is a stretch of I-10 in Houston that goes to Katy, Texas.

Rachel is my mother’s mother, was.

She gestured to her left, toward the hospital. She’d thought to tell me about the cut on my grandmother’s forehead after I told her about my having taken T. to the emergency room in Miami Beach.  

It was summer and T. was about twelve. At day camp, someone had backswung a miniature-golf golf club into her face and she bit through her lower lip. My name was on the emergency contact line of the camp registration form. T.’s parents, a Cuban fisherman with Santa Barbara tattooed across his back to watch his back, and her mother, a Mexican servant of Yemaya, white and blue spirit of the sea, were inland, headed back from Immokalee in a pick-up loaded down with watermelons and cantaloupes they’d re-sell from their front yard. Before their daughter’s first communion, they’d asked me to be the godfather, and one Sunday morning all the little brides of Christ were a field of Queen-Anne’s-Lace aligned in a half-dozen pews. In the center of each flower is a reddish or purple dot said to be ...