Things had been so challenging for us lately. It was nothing but lecturing. This was wrong, that was wrong. Follow your brother’s example, look how he entered the seminary.

For my mother, Gloria Alvarez de Lafont, having one child in the service of the Lord wasn’t enough. She would’ve only been satisfied if the three of us dedicated our lives to the noble cause, but Angélica was beyond hope with all those admirers, and me, well, my mother had made it her life’s goal to set me on the right path—no matter what.

To think that she’d been so proud of me when I told her I’d seen the Virgin. It had been months of prayer, of pilgrimage, of the eyes of the entire town and its surroundings on me. People had wanted to come see me, they wanted me to tell them all about the Sweet Mother, they’d traveled from every corner of the country to hear my message.

But that had been six years ago and my mother seemed to have forgotten already about our sore legs from kneeling on the cold floor—side by side—in prayer, or how she would comb my hair until it was as smooth as silk while she asked all the particulars of the Apparition. After all, she had to report every detail to her friends at the Cofradía since the town’s priest had forbidden me to share my experiences with anybody else.

Still gripping my ear, my mother hauled me across the kitchen and I did my best not to bump into counters and chairs.

“Armand! Armand!” she screeched.

But my father, thank God, was not home. He’d left for the warehouse early in the morning. I’d seen him from my bedroom window, from my prison.

I managed to set myself free once we reached the inner patio. But she got hold of my arm and dragged me all the way to the Saints Room.

This was my mother’s favorite room. It was smaller than the rest. It had a spare bed that had never been used and an armoire filled with doll-sized saints. There was the Virgin, of course, Saint Paul, Saint Joseph, and the Christ child. When I was little, I’d asked to play with the saints. After all, they looked just like dolls to me, but that had constituted the biggest sin and blasphemy of all time in my mother’s world.

An assortment of candles could be found inside one of the drawers with matches, rosaries, and the book of prayer.

“Right here, in front of all the saints, you’re going to purge!” my mother said in a roaring voice.

She handed me the cigarette, which I’d just started and had several more drags in it, and sentenced me.

“You’re going to eat this.”

Have I heard right? “Eat it?”

“Yes!”

She couldn’t possibly.

“Do it!”

“No!”