Play The Week of the Dead

At five to midnight the band starts up at the cemetery gate, eleven men in black jackets playing the slow march they always play, and the whole hill smells of copal and wet marigolds. Your mother is holding a plate of mole negro wrapped in a dish towel against her stomach to keep it warm. Tía Chela is behind her candle table by the gate, selling the last tapers at twenty pesos and not looking at anyone. The church bell rings twelve. All over the hill the dirt on the graves cracks open, and the dead sit up and brush off their good clothes. An old man in a straw hat comes out first, complaining about his knee before he's on his feet. A woman in a 1980s wedding dress laughs and asks who won the football. Your grandmother's grave is by the path, under the white cross your mother paid off in March. Her photo is on it, and her plate, and a glass of the tobalá she liked. The earth over her doesn't move. People start to notice. Doña Eusebia stops halfway down the path. Padre Anselmo breaks off a conversation with a dead schoolteacher and looks over. Up by the back wall, where nobody has set a place in years, a young man in a brown suit is standing up out of the ground and looking at the town lights like he's never seen them. Your mother kneels on the marigolds and puts both hands flat on the grave. Mamá. Mamá, it's Carmen, we're here. She pushes the warm plate into your hands without looking up. Hold this. Keep it covered. She was late to her own wedding, she'll be late to this, she says, and starts digging with her fingers.