Chapter 7: The Wake

By Sunday afternoon the holster bin by the bakery door held sixty-one guns.

It was a blue plastic bin that my aunt used for flan trays.

The widow had asked that no weapon go onto the floor of the wake.

The oldest of the three remaining domino men took charge of it without being asked.

He tore strips of masking tape and wrote a name and a caliber on each.

He stuck one on every gun before he laid it in the bin.

Men came in off Palm Avenue in black guayaberas and put their pistols down the way you leave shoes at a door.

The bin filled in ten minutes.

After that he started a second bin, and then he asked my aunt for a third.

We had hung black cloth over the ventanita, the pastry case and the cooler door.

The Judge was at the funeral home until Monday.

The wake was at the bakery because he had spent twenty-seven years of Saturdays there.

A photograph of him sat on the domino table in a frame from the dollar store.

In it he was laughing at someone off to the left, with a tile in his hand.

My grandmother had been in the kitchen since five.

She was cooking for two hundred, and she had not asked anyone how many were coming.

There were trays of picadillo, arroz con pollo, ropa vieja, yuca and eleven flans, and a stack of pastelitos taller than the register.

Nobody had told her to cook, and nobody could have stopped her.

She said nothing about guns.

She said nothing about the plaque on Palm Avenue, or the clip, or the Registry, or what I had put my name to.

She said "pásame la sal" and "más café."

She handed a plate to each person at the door with a look that made them eat.

Neighbors brought casseroles in foil, and the casseroles were mostly flan too.

Around two o'clock a man in a pressed shirt stood in the middle of the room and cleared his throat.

He lived three doors down, and he had a pistol in the bin with a tag that read .380.

"I want to say something to everyone," he said. "I fired eleven rounds toward the east side of the street yesterday."

"If one of those was the one, I'm sorry."

The room was silent for a moment.

"It wasn't you," said a woman by the coffee. "You couldn't hit a barn."

"Thank you," said the man. "I mean it. But I have to say it."

He went around the room and said it again to each table.

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