Silent prayer is the most difficult part. Please, God, Amadeo thinks, then loses the thread. His knees are pulverized. He wonders if he’s doing permanent damage. Outside, evening sounds: a car passing, the squawk of a night bird, the ping of moths against the painted-over windows.
AMADEO’S ENTRADA—his initiation and first audience with the hermanos—took place five weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday.
“At sundown, you knock,” Tíve had prepped him, when they met for lunch at Dandy’s Burgers in Espa?ola. His voice was low, and Amadeo threw a glance at the family at the table next to them. They weren’t paying attention, though. A boy about six or seven with ketchup on his pants was trying to eat his hamburger while his mother kept getting in his face with a napkin. Outside, Tíve’s dog Honey, a rust-colored Doberman, watched them through the window, one pale eyebrow raised, her undocked ears giving her a bat-like aspect.
“Three times you knock.” Tíve demonstrated on the table, scowling from under the brim of his trucker’s cap.
Amadeo’s mother adores her uncle. She has ideas of what a family should be, and according to these ideas, Tíve’s role is lonely, lovable curmudgeon. Mostly, Amadeo suspects, Tíve wants to be left alone, and not the way old people in TV movies want to be left alone, secretly waiting for some misguided young person to come along so that they might save each other. Tíve may be old, but he has no desire to spin yarns or reminisce or impart wisdom.
“Okay.” Amadeo nodded agreeably. He was hungry, but didn’t want to unwrap his hamburger first. Discreetly, he popped a fry into his mouth.
His great-uncle glared. Shriveled as he was, dude could be scary. “You fast and go to Mass that day, you hear? From here on out, you need to be regular with Mass. And confession, too.” Tíve handed him a brochure on the Rosary. “You know the words, right?”
“Doesn’t it mean more if I make up my own prayers?” Amadeo flapped the brochure. “Aren’t these just pre-memorized?” His uncle’s look of disgust shamed him.
Tíve reached into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt and handed Amadeo a folded piece of notebook paper. “Learn it good,” he said. “And don’t go talking about it to no one. These are secrets.”
Amadeo squinted at the unsteady block letters that had been copied out with a blunt pencil. It looked like a poem with many stanzas, and Amadeo had a flash of his fifth-grade language arts textbook, and a long rhyming poem about a butterfly that he’d liked to read to himself after school, whispering the words in his room, enjoying the rhythm, the inevitability of the sounds. Sky, eye, why. Stupid as fuck.
Midway down the page was a grease smudge, and Amadeo pictured his great-uncle frowning over the paper under the dim kitchen light, the cold remains of a sad, solitary dinner of scrambled eggs beside him.
“Hey, wait. This is in Spanish,” Amadeo said.
“Oh, hell,” Tíve muttered. He began unwrapping his burger, as if giving up.
Even Yolanda doesn’t speak Spanish well, though she, at least, can follow along with the telenovelas she watches weekday nights on her bedroom television. “I could do a much better job with English,” Amadeo offered, then, at his uncle’s incredulity, corrected himself. “I mean, I’m kidding. I can definitely learn it. I did Spanish in high school.”
The first part of the ritual was a call-and-response.
Novicio: Dios toca en esta misión, las puertas de cu clemencia. God knocks at this mission, on the gates of his mercy.
Hermanos: Penitencia, penitencia, si quieres tu salvación. Penance, penance, if you want salvation.
“Go on. Practice,” said Tíve, and Amadeo, suddenly shy, spoke his lines. He was surprised when, in reply, his great-uncle began to sing, his voice gravelly and beautiful. At the table next to them, the little boy paused in his chewing, his cheeks full, and watched.