He paused again. Shoved a huge bite of cake into his mouth. He did not look up at them as he chewed and swallowed. No one spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring everybody down.”
A long pause.
Then the teen girl, Luisa, said, “I want to give him the medal. My Jude medal. Can I give it to him?”
Raymond looked up to see her exchanging glances with first one of her parents, then the other.
“The one your abuela gave you?” Sofia asked. “Are you sure you want to do that, honey?”
“Yeah. I’m sure. He needs it more than I do. Anyway, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t be wearing it anymore. Because that makes it seem like I’m still hopeless. And I’m not. I’m good now.”
Raymond stared at her as she spoke. She was thin and pretty, with straight hair that was so long she might have sat on it if she wasn’t careful. She spoke in a high, quiet voice. There was something insubstantial about her. But only on the outside.
He looked to Luis and Sofia to see their reactions. He had no understanding of what was being offered, and that must have reflected in his eyes.
Luis Velez Senior said, “Luisa’s grandmother gave her a Saint Jude medal last year when she was sick. She had meningitis. It really looked like we were going to lose her for a while there. But she came through.”
A ringing silence. Raymond did not feel he could accept such a gift, but had no words to say so. At least, no words he did not fear would sound ungrateful.
The grandmother spoke up for the first time since Raymond arrived. She spoke in breathless Spanish, one word running into the next. Raymond did not understand one of them. Also, he could not have separated one out from the crowd to look it up in his book.
He raised his gaze and caught Luis’s eye.
“I’m sorry. What did she say?”
“You’re sorry a lot,” Luis said. “And I don’t think you need to be.”
“That’s what Mrs. G always tells me.”
It was Sofia who answered his question. “Abuela says it’s not a family heirloom. She says she bought it at the store for Luisa, and if she ever needed to, she could go buy another. And she also agrees that you should not wear the medal if your case is not hopeless.”
Luisa rose from the table and walked to Raymond, who pushed his chair back slightly and then froze in fear. Why fear, he had no idea. He was simply afraid of people. Afraid to be approached. It seemed to make no sense, but there was little he could do about it. At least, as far as he could tell.
The girl pulled the medal out from under her peach-colored shirt. It was on a heavy chain. A long chain. She slipped it off over her head, and Raymond sat very still as she reached out and slid the chain over his head. One of her hands accidentally brushed against his closely cropped hair, and he shivered slightly, because it tickled.
“There,” she said. “Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Now you have him with you.”
“Thank you,” Raymond said, his voice hushed with awe.
Raymond did not believe in the saints. He did not think that Saint Jude was now with him, helping him with his hopeless cause. He did, however, very much believe in the simple magic of a girl who barely knew him, yet would be so kind. And that kindness, he knew, would stay with him through the end of the Luis Project. However it turned out.
He held the medal in his hand, out away from his chest. As if it had something to tell him, and he could listen by feel.
“That’s such a nice thing to do,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Luisa said, returning to her place at the table. Swinging her long hair out of the way before she sat. “It just felt like the right thing. It felt like it wanted to be yours.”
They sat in the living room together, a relentlessly spotless area with plastic slipcovers on all the furniture. Raymond’s stuffed wing chair squeaked underneath him when he shifted his weight, so he tried not to.
Luis Senior was speaking. The boys and the grandparents had gone their separate ways. Luisa sat across the room and watched Raymond finger the medallion she had given him. The toddler, whose name he had forgotten, stood too close and stared into Raymond’s face.
“I just feel bad,” Luis was saying. “Because I really want to be the guy who was helping the blind woman do her errands. And I don’t just mean because you wanted me to be. I mean I want to be that guy. I always thought I’d be that guy. But then I have all these kids, and we’re taking care of Sofia’s parents, and we both work full time. But still, I look back over what I’ve done in my life, and it’s good and all . . . but I still want to be that guy.”