Have faith, Samuel.
She’d never let me down.
“Papá, venga, venga quiero ir,” Fernando said, shaking me from my reverie. He wanted to keep driving with the top down.
“Quiero mostrarte algo,” I said. I want to show you something. “Esto solo tardará un minuto. Ven conmigo.” It will only take a minute. Come with me.
I pushed open the car door. Fernando retrieved the bouquet of flowers we’d bought earlier and together we all climbed the steps. They appeared more narrow, and not as steep as I recalled from my childhood, and because I was taller, she came into view much sooner than when I’d been a young boy. I saw her veil, then her face, then the beauty of her blue-and-white robes. I stopped my ascent.
“Everything okay?” Mickie asked.
It dawned on me where I’d seen the same statue, and I recalled my mother telling me on more than one occasion that the Blessed Mother was always watching over me.
“La Virgen de Lourdes,” I said to Fernando.
That evening, as Mickie prepared dinner and Fernando lay on the carpet watching television, I sat down on the couch to read the newspaper and heard the bells in the steeple of OLM ringing out the six o’clock hour. I’d started to notice the bells more frequently, and each time I did I closed my eyes and allowed the sound to transport me back to that sunny afternoon outside the rehabilitation center when my father looked up at me from his wheelchair, his body streaked with shadows from the branches of the oak tree, and spoke in his ethereal whisper.
There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.
Because of my father’s circumstances, I had thought it a sad commentary on life, but I now understood that he was offering me his own gift, one that only time can provide. He was offering me the gift of perspective. My father was telling me that while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver’s license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children.
And the cycle begins anew.
We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.
I reached into the bowl I kept on the end table, feeling the worn spots where her fingers kneaded each bead, and I started as she taught me.
For I am my mother’s son.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m not really certain what the genesis for this novel was. It was, I suppose, a number of different things rattling around inside me and looking for a way to escape, the way water will always weep through concrete, no matter how many times the concrete is patched, as Sam Hell observes. I’m one of ten kids, so the genesis of this novel couldn’t very well have been my own childhood, and yet, in a way, I suppose it was.
On June 24, 1973, my mother gave birth to her tenth child, Michael Sean Dugoni. I was twelve years old and can also remember the births of my two brothers prior to Michael. This was like Christmas mornings for us. I’d awake and my older sisters Aileen and Susie would be in charge, telling me that “Mom is in the hospital having a baby.” We would all wait with great anticipation for her and my father to return home. On this particular occasion, however, things were different. It was not the joyous occasions of the prior experiences. Two things stood out to me. I remember when my father came home from the hospital it was without my mother, and he had been crying. His eyes were red and his demeanor subdued. Over the course of the next day or so, I was to learn that my brother Michael had Down syndrome.