Truth is, Mr. Ochoa was never very fond of Black people—mayates—even though his unflappably loyal director of accounts billable for thirty years, Francine Evers, was a petite, rail-thin Black woman with thick-lens glasses and a shy demeanor. He told my mother Francine was an exception; she wasn’t like the rest of them. Apparently, my father was another exception to the mayate rule, since he had married into the greater Chicano family and was a cop who had chosen to live in Mexicantown. My mother believed Esme, Ochoa’s late wife, had been the quiet catalyst behind her husband’s growing list of exceptions to the myths and assumptions about the mayate.

Now, twenty years later, I sat across from Mr. Ochoa in the second-floor Authentico Foods, Inc. office, still located in Mexicantown on a city-block-long stretch of Vernor Highway a mile east of the I-75 freeway. With me was my godmother, Elena Gutierrez, wife of my godfather and best friend, Tomás.

To Mr. Ochoa’s right was his beautiful, dark-eyed daughter, Jacqueline. When I’d known Jackie in middle and high school, she had always been nice enough, but distant. Fifteen years later, she still inspired a quickened heartbeat and electrified hormones. For college, she had gone away to USC. I had mended my broken heart by going to Wayne State and chasing other girls who might have resembled Jackie.

Standing next to her like a sentry in a snappy suit was Daniel Antonio Romero, Esq. Danny was the Ochoa family lawyer and a self-inflated, insufferable prick. I’d known him since middle and high school, too. A snake-skinned bully, moderately talented football jock and ladies’ man, who, not unlike myself, could never get next to the one love of his life—Jackie Ochoa. Even now, when he had one hand gently placed on Jackie’s shoulder, it was easy to see he wanted to impress her. At one point she looked up at Danny and dispassionately assured him she was quite all right. Reluctantly he removed his hand. Clearly, Danny was a horse with a bit in his mouth and saddle on his back.

To Mr. Ochoa’s left was Francine Evers, frailer than I remembered her, cradling a stack of thick, overstuffed binders.

“It’s good to see you, Octavio,” Mr. Ochoa said in a strained voice. “You served our country just like our beloved Norberto.” Save for Jackie, we all made the Sign of the Cross. “And your mother—she was a wonderful woman. A woman of God. Like my Esme. My heart was broken when she went home to Jesus.” He paused to suck in a long breath of oxygen through his nose-mounted breathing tube.

Mr. Ochoa had suffered through two bouts of throat cancer. Chemo, radiation and two surgeries had left him a gaunt, ashen man with a whisper-thin voice. Now he was succumbing to lymphoma, which wanted what scraps remained of him.