The summer heat settled over the valley with the particular generosity that California reserved for its most golden months. Hector had come home from Stanford with ink stained fingers, a sharper mind, and one year left to finish what he'd started. He had expected to find the ranch as he'd left it. He had not expected to find his mother still moving carefully, as though she were relearning the particular weight of her own body.
She hadn't said much about the influenza. None of them had. But Hector had noticed the way his father's eyes tracked her across a room, and the way the staff moved around her with a solicitude they were all pretending wasn't there. Imogen, for her part, was pretending hardest of all.
He had been in town that afternoon when he spotted her coming from the south, moving with purpose if not quite her usual ease, and he had fallen into step at a distance without entirely meaning to. She led him to the cemetery, to the bench outside the Stacey mausoleum, where she settled herself with the unhurried stillness of a woman who had made her peace with the company of the dead.
She didn't startle when he approached, just shifted slightly to make room for him beside her, as though she'd been expecting him all along. They sat together facing the mausoleum, the summer making its noise around them, and neither of them spoke for a while.
"You're watching me," she said finally, without accusation. "You and your father both. I can feel it."
"You were at death's door, Mother."
"I was," she agreed, with an equanimity that made his chest ache. "And now I am here, in this cemetery of all places, which I will admit requires a certain sense of humor." The corner of her mouth moved. "Sit down, Hector."
For a moment he said nothing, fiddling with his fingers the way he did when he was working something out.
"There was a lit candle at abuela's grave," he said quietly.
"There is one every week," Imogen replied.
Hector nodded slowly, sitting with that. "I wish I had known her," he said after a moment. "Not as a child knows someone, but properly."
Imogen looked at him then, really looked at him, in the way she had that made a person feel both seen and gently held. "She would have known exactly what to make of you," she said. "That was her particular gift. She saw people clearly, even when they couldn't see themselves."
The mausoleum sat quiet before them. Hector glanced at it, then back at his hands.
"Do you think of him?" he asked carefully. "When you're here. Or is it only Julius that brings you?"
Imogen did not answer immediately. She folded her hands in her lap and considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
"Cornelius is there," she said finally, with a measured evenness that gave nothing away. "As he always was. Taking up space." The faintest pause. "Julius brings me here. Your grandmother brings me here. The others..." She let the sentence find its own ending. "I light the candles that need lighting."
Hector understood, he thought, as much as he was meant to.
"I chose business because of Julius," he said after a moment. "Because we lost that when we lost him and someone had to learn it. But I think..." He fiddled his hands again. "I also chose it because I wanted to know him. The man he was. Not the Julius I remember, who was already grown and gone by the time I was old enough to pay attention. I wanted to know him the way you knew him. The way Peg knew him. And now the only way I know how to reach him is to try to become something he would have recognized."
Imogen was quiet for a moment, her eyes traveled to the ground in front of her feet.
"That is the way of things," she said, with the particular gentleness she reserved for true things. "You think because he is gone his influence stops. It doesn't. It simply changes. Julius shaped you when he was living without knowing he was doing it, and he shapes you still, only now you are the one holding the chisel. You are aspiring toward something, yes, but that something is not nothing simply because he cannot confirm it." She paused. "The only difficulty is that the only living one in the equation is asking a dead one to tell him he did it right."
Hector let out a long breath, something loosening in his chest that he hadn't known was tight.
"Does it get easier?" he asked. "Carrying them?"
Imogen considered this with the seriousness it deserved.
"You stop trying to put them down," she said finally. "That's not the same thing as easier, but it's something."
She reached over and patted his hand once, the way she did when a thing was settled. They sat together a while longer in the summer quiet, facing the mausoleum, and Hector thought that if this was what carrying them looked like, he supposed he could learn it.
He didn't have much choice but to.
