My grandfather's altar

My mom started the altar on October 20th, twelve days before it was needed, because according to her "good things are done slowly." I found out from a photo she sent to the group: the little living-room table under a white cloth, three shoeboxes as steps and, on the top one, a portrait of Grandpa Tomás in a crooked frame. Andrea replied with a heart. Lucía with "aw, so beautiful, I can't come." I had just woken up and wrote "did you put out the water yet?", which was all I could think of and turned out to be the right question.

I went to her house this afternoon, my knee still on strike and market bags in both hands. My mom was on the floor, half under the table, looking for the cord of the electric candles she'd bought because "the wax ones scare me with the cat." I told her the cat has been dead since 2021. She said fear doesn't die.

What he liked to eat

The argument started with the tamales. My mom swore Grandpa Tomás was a rajas tamale man, the kind they sold on the corner by the church. I remembered something else: a deep bowl of arroz con leche at six in the evening, too much cinnamon, the raisins pushed to the rim like little pebbles. We stood in the living room, each holding a piece of pan de muerto in its cellophane, trying to remember a man who died when I was fourteen and who, I now realize, almost never said what he wanted.

In the end we put out both. The tamales on a plate, the arroz con leche in a plastic cup because we couldn't find the bowl, and beside it all a tiny glass of mezcal my mom poured very carefully and then drank on the sly "so it doesn't evaporate," she said, with a dignified face nobody buys.

The crooked photo

The crooked frame isn't an oversight. My mom explained while arranging the flowers: since my grandmother Rosario died, that photo hasn't been straightened because "that's how he left it the last time he touched it." She's convinced that if we fix it, he'll stop visiting. I spend my nights around people clinging to details smaller than that, so I said nothing and handed her the flowers.

It took the new phone to close the day. My mom wanted to send a photo of the altar to Lucía and still doesn't know which button is the camera and which is the flashlight, so she got four photos of the ceiling and one of her finger. The fifth worked. You can see the table, the boxes, the bread, the yellow light of the fake candles, and in one corner, blurry, my hand setting down a tamale.

Before leaving I switched on the candles. They all lit at once with a click, and the living room turned the color of four in the morning in the ER, when everything has already happened. My mom turned off the ceiling light. We stood quietly for a while, looking at the crooked portrait, until she said, very softly: "The tamales were rajas, right?" I told her yes.