The funeral was in Allentown, in the church where Elena and Carmen had been baptized, where their mother had once sung in the choir before cancer took her when Elena was nineteen and Carmen sixteen. That older loss rose up beside the new one like a tide remembering the moon. Relatives who had taken sides during Carmen's worst years arrived carefully, spoke carefully, and left early. Sofia wore a dark dress and the sparkly necklace because Elena could not bear to refuse her every comfort, and she sat between her parents and asked, in a whisper, whether Abuelo could still see dinosaurs from heaven. Elena said she hoped so. Marco squeezed Sofia's shoulder.
The days between death and burial were dense with logistics and sudden sharp griefs. Elena and Carmen sorted through their father's apartment together—an efficiency unit near the hospital where he had moved after selling the Allentown house. They found photo albums. They found a rosary. They found a shoebox of cards Elena had sent over the years and, beneath them, a smaller stack of unsent letters addressed to Carmen in Ricardo's shaky hand. Carmen sat on the carpet and read one aloud until her voice broke. Elena took the next one and read it for her. In the letters, Ricardo apologized for not knowing how to help without enabling, for loving clumsily, for the nights he had locked the door and then unlocked it again. He asked Carmen to stay sober as a gift to herself, not as rent for his affection.
"I did not know he wrote these," Carmen whispered.
"He was always writing speeches he was afraid to give," Elena said. "We inherited that."
They donated clothes. They kept the coffee mug he used every morning. They argued once about a radio—whether to sell it or keep it—and the argument became, underneath, an argument about who had been the better daughter, until both of them stopped and laughed a ruined laugh because the question was stupid and grief was making them temporarily stupid on purpose.
Marco handled calls to relatives. He drove Sofia to a neighbor's house during the worst of the sorting. He cooked without being asked. Elena noticed and filed the noticing under things that did not erase the wound and still mattered.
At the funeral home, standing before the open casket, Elena touched her father's tie and whispered the plantain recipe he had asked about, step by step, as if feeding him one last ordinary thing. Carmen stood beside her and sang, very softly, a fragment of a song their mother used to hum. Neither of them cared who heard.