The smell of the chapel brings me back in time — or tries to. Incense and overripe flowers. Perfume. Cologne. I fight it off and focus on the present. Many dead pass through here. My mother among them, but so what? It’s not all that strange or meaningful.
We proceed through the anteroom, with its many photo boards of José Miguel, into the main chamber where the ceiling soars, where the tall windows behind the casket and the pulpit are melted rainbows of stained glass. There’s Mary. There’s Jesus and the Apostles. A few sheep.
A trickle of well-wishers offers condolences to the immediate family. One of the relatives spots us, a woman in a short black blazer and a matching pencil skirt. She dispatches a wave and a sad smile. My uncle’s return wave is too grand, as though they’ve spotted each other in a mosh pit. He knows it, too. Drops his hand quickly to his neck. Jerks his head toward a pew in back. We have a seat. We fumble with the programs that were handed to us. On the cover is a picture of José Miguel. There were several better options back there on the photo boards. This one is grainy and unsmiling, straight-on like a mugshot, so that I imagine St. Peter as a gray-faced clerk running intake at Central Booking.
A couple with a daughter of five or six sits in the pew ahead of us. Growing bored with her coloring book, she cranes her neck around the chapel, taking in its practiced austerity, the adult pageantry of mourning. Like an owl or a demonic child, her head rotates 180°. She and my uncle lock eyes. The result is something I know will stick with me forever, though I’ll never be able to explain why, not properly, because it’s only my subjective compilation of who and what my uncle is that makes it noteworthy.
For half a minute or so, as they trade smiles and silly faces, I don’t recognize the man beside me. We’ve never met before. It’s almost unsettling, the extent to which he transforms, as if possessed by the entity of someone warm and inviting, someone vulnerable and boyish.
Joyous — that’s what it is.
His interaction with this girl is bringing him pure, unmistakable joy. And while I’ve seen him laugh himself out of his chair on several occasions, it was always at the absurdity of something, never the pleasure.
Then the proceedings begin, and the girl’s parents instruct her to turn around and sit still, and my uncle becomes recognizable again, futzing with his tie, making it crooked when it was straight. A crease returns across his forehead. The priest opens with a call and response in Spanish. I submit to the moment by firing off a quick prayer, first to my mother, whose line is thankfully disconnected, who fled this stodgy mausoleum long ago for some proverbial greener pasture, then to José Miguel , whom, to be clear, I’ve never even met, but who I hope witnessed what I witnessed and maybe even orchestrated it in some way, though I have no clue what I mean by that and am probably — certainly — being ridiculous.
Dodge Zelko is a mailman and a Midwest lifer. When he’s not jamming bills in your box, he’s hard at work on his novel.
Dodo Eraser 
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