Chapter 5: Perla

On Wednesday I took him to meet my mother.

I did it because I wanted her to see his face in daylight, and because I wanted to see it myself.

St. Cecilia's church hall sits behind the old brick church on Southwest Boulevard, with a linoleum floor and a kitchen as big as a ship's galley.

My mother has run it for eleven years.

At ten that morning she was up to her elbows in a vat of rice for the parish's Lenten lunch, with a hairnet on and her sleeves shoved up.

Aurelio stood in the kitchen door in his dark coat and looked like a man who had walked into the wrong building.

"Mamá," I said. "This is Aurelio."

She did not wipe her hands.

She looked him up and down once, taking her time, from his shined shoes to his silver temples.

"You are the one," she said.

He stood straighter. "Yes, ma'am."

"You are older than I thought."

"Yes, ma'am," Aurelio said. "I'm forty-one."

My mother said, "Hm."

She turned back to the rice and stirred it with a paddle as long as a canoe oar.

I thought she was dismissing him.

Then she said over her shoulder, without turning, "Do you go to Mass?"

He thought about it.

I watched him reach for something smooth to say, and put it down.

"No," he said. "Not for twenty years."

"Why not?"

"I don't know that I'm allowed."

My mother stopped stirring.

She turned around and wiped her hands slowly on her apron.

She took a clean dish towel from the hook by the sink and held it out to him.

"There are four hundred plates," she said. "The dishwasher is broken."

Aurelio looked at the towel.

Then he took off his coat.

I saw him hesitate over where to put it, and my mother pointed at a hook with her chin.

He hung up a coat that cost more than her car.

He rolled his sleeves to the elbow and stood at her old steel sink in his good white shirt, washing plates.