Have You Seen Luis Velez?(95)

Then she hurried away as though she couldn’t bear the pressure a moment longer.

A man in his thirties approached the table. An African American man with a shaved head and a beard but no mustache.

“You’re the widow,” he said to Isabel. It didn’t sound like a question.

“Yes,” she said.

“I just wanted to come tell you I’m sorry for your loss. And I’m sorry the jury didn’t get it, but I just wanted you to know that a lot of people get it—what a loss it was to you and how wrong it was that it ever happened that way.”

He reached out for Isabel’s hand, and she reached out in return. The man didn’t shake her hand exactly. Just held it and gave it a squeeze.

Isabel opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know that. And I put a check in the collection jar. Not a lot, but it’s what I can do. You know. For the children.”

He let go of her hand and turned to walk away.

Raymond looked up to see an older woman and a young couple standing behind the man. Waiting their turn to talk to the widow.

The older woman stepped up first.

“I just want to say how sorry I am. Your husband might not have mattered as much as he should have to everybody, but he did to me. Even though I never met him. But I have three sons just about your age. His age. So I get it.”

“Thank you,” Isabel said.

Then the last couple stepped up, but by then they were no longer the last. The line had grown behind them. There were probably closer to fifty people out in the street now, and a good twenty of them had lined up to talk to the widow. To offer their condolences and make it clear that they cared, even if the jury hadn’t cared nearly enough.

“Somebody should tell them it was your loss, too,” Raymond whispered to Mrs. G.

“Absolutely not,” she whispered back. “This is Isabel’s moment. You let her have it. This has nothing to do with anyone but Luis’s widow and his children. I’m glad to know so many people care, too, but today is not about me.”



An hour into the party, the band changed. The steel drums were replaced by a four-piece band with a vocalist, who played modern pop songs and asked for requests before each one.

“Something slow!” Isabel called out.

Then she handed the baby to her eleven-year-old daughter, Maria Elena, and reached a hand out to Esteban.

“Esteban likes to slow dance,” she said.

Mother and son rose hand in hand and joined three other couples who danced together in the middle of the street.

Esteban’s head only came up a little higher than Isabel’s waist, but they looked sweet together in spite of that. Or maybe because of it. Raymond noticed that several of the people watching took photos of them with their cell phones.

“Oh,” Raymond said suddenly. Seized with a sudden thought. He held a hand out to Mrs. G. “Would you care to dance?”

“I would be delighted,” she said.

She had downed two half-full cups of beer on top of her one hot dog and half a hamburger. Somehow the combination of food and drink seemed to have done wonders for her mood.

He rose, and took her hand, and led her out into the street.

“I should warn you,” he said, “I’m a terrible dancer.”

“I hardly think it matters. You will be the best dancer I’ve had as a partner in nearly twenty years. You can’t lose.”

She placed her left arm at his waist, and took his hand with her right. They stood with a good foot of air between them. Raymond tried, pathetically, to lead.

“Sorry,” he said in a moment when he had missed the beat badly.

“I thought you were trying to get over being sorry.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah.”

He almost added the word “sorry,” but he caught himself just in time.



“I used to know how to cut a rug,” Mrs. G said between songs.

“How to what a what?”

“It’s an expression. It means I was a pretty good dancer. Or at least an enthusiastic one.”

She stood back from Raymond, alone in the middle of the street, and began to dance. She swung her legs back and forth, one leg at a time kicking out behind her, then out front. She held her arms out to the sides, palms out and fingers up. She spun all the way around and began again. People formed a circle around her to watch, some filming her on their cell phones. When she got to the part where her knees knocked together and apart, her hands crossing back and forth in front of them, the crowd applauded.

There were a good eighty people in the street by then.

Mrs. G stopped dancing and stood panting, and the crowd went wild with applause. Her face broke into a grin, the likes of which Raymond had never seen on her before. In time they accepted that they had seen all the dancing she had in her.

“Play the bunny hop song,” a stranger yelled in the direction of the band. “Everybody knows the bunny hop.”

They knew it. They played it. More than half the partygoers formed a human chain snaking down the street, punctuating their dance with three comical hops each time the music indicated them. Raymond was right behind Mrs. G, his hands on her shoulders, for about three sets of hops. Then he felt her slump and almost fall.