"I can't go to a funeral looking like this." He'd been workshopping variations on this argument since we crossed the bridge. "These bandages show through my shirt. I look like I lost a fight with a lawnmower."
"You're not going to the funeral."
I turned. Eight had her knees pulled up.
"Jasper." I faced forward. "You're staying in the car with Eight and Lorenzo."
He paused with his hand on the door handle.
"This isn't Pantheon business,” I said. “This is a funeral. My uncle's funeral. Half the people in that church watched me learn to walk, and the other half have known me since I was small enough to fit in my grandmother's pocket. You walk in there with whatever you've got under your jacket, and they're gonna spend the entire service trying to figure out if you're FSB or just generically Eastern European and dangerous." I held his stare. "I can't have that today."
"I wasn't planning on bringing the katana."
"Jasper. You'll scare the children just by existing."
He settled back and clenched his jaw once, swallowing whatever argument about perimeter security he'd been loading into the chamber. He reached for the cigarettes on the dash. "Go bury your uncle, Diego."
The heat hit me as soon as I got out, then the smell of hot stone and rosemary and whatever my grandmother had been cooking since dawn.
I had the same jeans I'd been wearing for two days and a shirt with Lorenzo's blood dried into the cuff. I stopped at the door and turned the shirt inside out, hiding the stain against my skin. Blood was marime, and I wasn't walking into my uncle's funeral wearing death on my sleeve where everyone could see it. Emilio would've walked in with me and pointed at that stain and saidat least you came honestly, sobrino, and then he would've told the entire church about the time I showed up to Christmas mass with gunpowder residue on my collar and tried to convince Abuela it was from fireworks.
I walked toward the doors, and my legs fought me the whole way.
The church was small enough that everyone turned when I walked in, which was fine because I'd been turning heads in this building since I was old enough to deserve the attention.
My mother launched herself out of the second pew like a heat-seeking missile in black lace. She grabbed both my arms, hauled me down to her height, and kissed my forehead hard enough to leave a mark that would probably still be there at dinner. "You're late."
"I'm twenty minutes early, mamá."
"For you, that's late." She found the bloodstain on my cuff and pressed her lips together in a way that meantwe're talking about this later and you're not going to enjoy it. Then she pulled me into the pew, and I went because you don't argue with Carmen Reyes in a church. You don't argue with Carmen Reyes anywhere, but in a church the consequences have spiritual dimensions, and I'd already used up my quota of consequences for the week.
My grandmother, Amparo, sat on her other side, spine not touching the pew back, stubborn at eighty-three and determined to stay that way until God gave up and let her win. She gave me one look, did a full accounting, and turned back to the altar like she'd seen exactly what she expected and wasn't impressed.
The casket sat up front under white flowers threaded with Lucenio blue ribbon. I stared at it for maybe three seconds before I had to find something else to look at or I was going to lose it right there in the pew in front of half the family and most of the people who'd known me since I was small.
That something else was Danior.
He sat across the aisle, close to the front, positioned exactly where everyone could see him being present and grief-stricken and appropriate. His suit fit the way suits fit when you've had them tailored and ready and waiting. His hair was perfect. His shoes gleamed. I'd known Danior since we were small enough toshare a bed at my grandmother's house, and I could read him the way you read a book you've already memorized, the way you know what's coming three pages before it arrives. He'd been working this room since before they closed the casket, every handshake a campaign stop, every arm around a shoulder an investment with an expected return.
He caught me staring and nodded.
I nodded back and turned away.
I stood, and my mother put her hand on my knee, held it there for a beat, and then lifted it so I could go pay my respects.
The aisle stretched out longer than it should have, like the church had added extra distance while I wasn't looking. Hands reached from the pews as I passed, and I pressed back into every single one because that was the language, and you didn't leave it unanswered. Someone said my name. Someone else shushed them. The flowers on the casket were too sweet, working too hard to cover something they couldn't cover, and I stopped in front of the box.
The floor tilted under me.
They'd put him in some suit I'd never seen him wear, not once in forty years, with his hair combed back off his forehead in a way he never wore it, not once in his entire life. They'd smoothed his face into something peaceful, and that was the most wrong thing of all because Emilio was not peaceful. Emilio was loud. Emilio laughed until he cried at jokes nobody else understood. Emilio arm-wrestled a guy twice his size at a cousin's wedding, lost so catastrophically he took the cake off the table with him, and then gave the best man's speech with frosting in his eyebrow and the groom still recovering.
They'd put him in a tie.
The man who said ties were invented by people who hated necks, lying there in a tie with his hands folded like he was praying, and I almost reached down to loosen it before Iremembered it wouldn't matter anymore. It wouldn't matter because Emilio was dead, and I hadn't been there and he was never going to laugh again.
His tools lay beside him: the soldering iron he'd taught me on with the handle worn smooth from decades of the same grip in the same place, wire cutters from the top drawer, the good ones he never lent out, not even to me, and a photograph tucked against his ribs. I kept my eyes off the photograph because if I looked at it, I was going to fall apart.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the switchblade he'd given me when I was fourteen. It was a cheap thing, loose in the hinge, the handle wrapped in electrical tape because the original grip had cracked years ago. He'd handed it to me behind his shop and saidevery man needs a knife that's been loved badly,and I'd carried it ever since.
