“Because it is mine, Yvette,” I said, “and so is the company.” I put my hand flat on the Denver envelope. “I sold Sánchez Roofing in August. Eight million, one hundred thousand dollars. Sixty crews, every truck, every ladder. I did not tell Rubén because I wanted to know what kind of son I had.” Yvette sat very still. Her parents, an elegant couple in their sixties who had always looked at me as if I smelled of tar, were staring at the form from the funeral home. Rubén stood with one hand on his collar, and the other hand reaching helplessly toward the table, as if he could pull it all back into the envelope.
His mother in law, Doña Lupe, crossed herself again. “Rubén,” she said quietly, in Spanish, “tell me this is not true.” The face of Rubén was the color of ash. “Mamá Lupe, it is not what you think,” he began. I interrupted him, as gently as I could. “Mijo, it is exactly what she thinks. You took the cross, the ring, and the earrings from the body of your mother before the casket was closed. You signed the form. You told me she had them in her hands.” My voice shook. “I held that casket lid, and I kissed her forehead, and I thought she was wearing her cross. For three months I thought so.”
Rubén sank into a chair. His shoulders were shaking, and he did not try to stop them. “Papá, I am sorry,” he said, so low I could barely hear. “I was in so much debt. The house, the cars, the quinceañera. I thought, I will just borrow them. I will pawn them and get them back before anyone knows.” He pulled the chain from under his shirt, and the little gold cross swung in the light of the dining room. “But I could not do it. Every time I took them to a shop, I thought of her. So I kept the cross, and I wore it, and I told myself it was close to her.” He began to weep.
A gold cross on a chain under a dance floor light told a roofer where his wife went and gave him back his son.
I looked at my son, forty eight years old, with the eyes of his mother and the stubborn chin of his mother, and I thought of Carmen. She was the gentlest woman I ever knew. She once fed a stray dog for six months and cried when it was adopted. She would not have wanted me to be hard on him. She would have said, Ignacio, he is your son. I moved to the sideboard and took the rosary of Carmen, the old wooden one with the chipped crucifix, and I held it in my palm. “Rubén,” I said. “Do you know what your mother whispered to me the night before she died?”
He shook his head, tears running down his cheeks. “She said, Do not let our children become strangers,” I told him. “She said, they are not bad, they are only afraid.” I closed my fingers around the rosary. “I have been angry at you for three days. But I have been afraid for eleven years, since the day you stopped climbing the ladder with me. I did not know how to tell you that I wanted you at my side, not only at my funeral.” Rubén stood up. He crossed the room, and he fell to his knees and put his arms around my waist. I felt the cold chain against my shirt.
I put my hand on his head, the way I did when he was a little boy. For a long time, none of us spoke. Doña Lupe was weeping into a handkerchief. Yvette sat with her hands over her face. Then her father, a stern, silver haired man named Arturo, stood and said, in a voice thick with feeling, “Ignacio, I owe you an apology. We looked down on you. We said you were just a roofer.” He shook his head. “A man who builds sixty crews from one ladder is not just a roofer. I am ashamed.” I said, “Arturo, we are family now. There is no shame between us.”
Then I laid out my terms. “Rubén, you will return the ring and the earrings by Saturday. Wherever they are. If you pawned them, you will redeem them with your own money.” He nodded. “And I want to take that photograph again.” They all looked at me, confused. “The one from the quinceañera. The one where the old man was cropped out. I want a new one. With me in the middle.” Yvette burst into tears, and said she would arrange it herself. “And one more thing,” I said. “You will come to my house every Sunday, all of you, for green chile stew. I want my grandchildren to know who their grandmother was.”
Rubén returned the ring and the earrings on Friday, in a small blue box. He had sold nothing. He had only hidden them in a drawer, because he could not bear to part with them. I took them to the cemetery that Saturday morning, with my son, and we stood in front of the headstone on the south side of the valley while the wind moved the dry grass. I did not bury them again. I put the cross around my own neck, and I gave the ring and the earrings to my granddaughter Sofia, the girl of the quinceañera, who stood shivering in her good coat.
The photograph was taken on a Sunday afternoon in October, in my backyard, under the cottonwood tree that Carmen planted. The whole family crowded in, three generations, in their best clothes. The photographer arranged us in rows. And in the very middle, in a folding chair, wearing my old work boots, sat an old roofer with a gold cross at his throat. Sofia sat on one arm of the chair and Rubén stood behind me with his hand on my shoulder, and for the first time I could remember, nobody told me to move to the back. The camera clicked. I did not stop smiling.
That picture hangs in my living room now, above the fireplace. Rubén comes on Sundays and helps me carry the chairs to the yard. He has started joining me at the old shop on Saturday mornings, the little one I kept, and last month he climbed a ladder for the first time in thirty years. His hands shook at the top, and I stood at the bottom holding the rungs. “Papá,” he called down, grinning, “I can see the whole valley from here.” I laughed. “Of course you can, mijo,” I called back. “That is why your mother and I built it so high.”
