Eddie looked away, not answering. His mother picked up the sleeve of the gown between her fingers and rubbed her eyes on the cotton. “I had a feeling. A long time I’ve had a feeling. I kept saying to myself, No, it’s just the class Eddie’s interested in. He’s going to get a job, make honest money. All those troubles are behind him, the bad company he kept and all that talk about how to live easy without working.”

Eddie walked around the room a little. He knew his mother had the right to say what she was saying. She had stood by him in every scrape he’d been in, from the earliest time when he’d still been in grammar school and had been caught stealing money from the teacher’s purse. He and Skip. He hadn’t told anyone that Skip had been in it with him. He’d kept his mouth shut; the principal had whipped him with a wooden paddle, had warned his mother that a second offense would mean the juvenile court. And she had taken the principal’s harsh words with dignity, with composure, and, going home, she had stopped on a street corner and shyly, softly, she had asked Eddie if he would like a chocolate soda at the drugstore fountain. Eddie couldn’t remember a time when this Mexican mother of his had not had love and patience and gentleness in her, and so now he listened to her grieving and kept his mouth shut and waited.

“I will say a prayer first, and then I will get you the money,” she said. “Kneel down, my son.”

He knelt down, feeling a little awkward, and she began saying the Our Father in Spanish. After that she prayed to the Blessed Virgin, asking the help of the Mother of Christ for her son, asking that this most pure and merciful Mother who had known terror and despair in her time on earth should now listen to the anguish of another for her child.

When the prayer was finished she rose, crossing herself, and went into the kitchen. She brought a broken-backed chair from beside the door and placed it in front of a cupboard. She said to Eddie, “On the top shelf. The red can, the tomatoes. Take what is in there.”

Eddie got the can down, opened it.

“There is fifty-six dollars,” his mother told him. “Not much. It will take you a little way. Write to me when you get where you are going. Not here, send it to Mrs. Valdez. She’ll give it to me at church.”

Eddie stuffed the money into his pants pocket. They exchanged a last embrace. His mother’s body was big and flabby inside the gown; her hair smelled of oil; she had a faint odor of wine, too, from being around his father, from being shut up in the bedclothes with a stinking drunk.