ConcepciÓn

CONCEPCIÓN

My dad consulted gypsies on a regular basis. It was something we never talked about—me and my mother—but it was true. Reason I know is, one night he pulled over suddenly in front of a little stone house on the back side of a lemon grove out past Upland. My mom and I were in the car—me dressed in my choir robes from church and her in a navy blue suit with a little pillbox hat and purse to match. It was around Easter time and there’d been some big service with the men’s and boys’ choirs combined. My mom was very proud of my voice, she said, although I don’t see how she could have possibly picked it out from all those dozens of other voices. How she could have heard just mine. She sat in the passenger seat right in front of me and we both watched out the windows as my dad stood on the porch of the stone house under a yellow light ringing the doorbell. He was all decked out in his Air Force uniform with tiny moths and mosquito hawks cutting circles just above his captain’s hat. He was staring out past the lemon trees and the far-away lights of San Dimas as he waited for an answer at the door and never once looked back to us in the car. He seemed to have a lot on his mind, but whatever it was we weren’t included. The heavy sweet smell of lemon blossoms came right through the glass. There was a sign propped in the window of the little stone house that read “CONCEPCIÓN”—just that one word, handwritten in orange crayon with little blue Christmas lights around the border. A small porcelain crucifix hung right above the sign and the bright blood from Christ’s wounds seemed to stand out even more intensely against the pure enameled white of his skin. Finally someone came to the door and let my dad in. I couldn’t make out the face but I knew it was a woman by the way she softly shut the door and I saw the red ruffle of her long skirt disappear behind my father’s khakis. My mom and I sat in silence for a long while, listening to coyotes and the high shriek of owls diving for field mice in the orchard. The Santa Ana winds were blowing in from the east. My mother shifted the purse around on her lap and stared out the windshield. I had no idea what she was thinking.

“What’s that word mean?” I asked her.

“What word, sweetie?”

“That orange word in the window.”

“Oh, that’s Spanish or something,” she said after turning her head to read it.

“Spanish for what?”