You stayed. You told us both about your grandfather, who loved music but whose fear was even deeper than his love. Your grandfather had seen so many men in his family look for work, their spirits thinning out as they were told a hundred times, by a hundred different gadje, that they did not hire their kind.

You told us this with the resigned, good-natured look of knowing anything you told my bisabuela would be gossip on the señoras’ tongues by morning. Pobrecito, they would say. No wonder he must play. It is in his heart, his blood. It is a family trade.

It was the next day that we all went up into the hills. We carried our baskets of wine-deep cosmos, and red dahlias, and yellow poppies to the highest peaks we could bring such bulky canastas. We went so high that the air cooled, and we could see far enough to spot the rich man’s wedding, the bride a point of black hair and white lace on a walled lawn.

And when the right wind came, we tipped the baskets and shook them into the currents of air. The pink and green and red petals of cuetlaxochitl. The gladiolus in every shade from peach to deep blue. The sunflower petals the old women so carefully plucked from their centers, saving the seeds for toasted semillas de girasol. The black-brown thimble flowers edged in gold, like my cousins wearing necklaces in their hair.

I plunged my arms into those baskets of lady’s slippers and plumeria, the petals reddening my skin up to the elbows.

And when there were no more flowers to throw, when we all stood watching as the sky turned to petals, you reached for my hand. Even with the oil of those vicious flowers on my palm, you reached for my hand. You brushed your fingers against mine, and I moved my hand, without thinking, into yours.

You did not look at me, either out of shyness or awkwardness. Your hand held on to mine as all the color we had stripped from my great-grandmother’s village streamed through the air. We watched a river of cosmos and la flor de nochebuena cross the sky and then rain down over the rich man and his new wife.

Between our hands was the slight sting of those flowers I had handled. You shared it with me, a pain we would speak of later when, laughing, we put pomada on each other’s reddened palms. Laughing, as the few petals the wind was still tossing around fell down on us like dyed rain.

You looked at me, pausing in the middle of your own laugh, your mouth half-open like you were thinking of saying something.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you weren’t. Maybe the way you would tell it would be very different. Maybe after the sky rained flowers, after we both went home, you began to forget me.