heading to the open-air car park six blocks over, however, he’d gone back to the jewelry store. He’d decided, as he’d slumped along in the cold, that it was going to be closed—but he should have known better. It was the Christmas season, after all, and as he’d pushed his way into the store, the narrow and relatively shallow shop was crowded with people. He’d had to wait for a good fifteen minutes before he caught a salesperson’s eye, and when all she could do was shrug at him, like she couldn’t promise she’d be free anytime before New Year’s, he’d checked his watch and debated leaving.
The girl who’d finally waited on him had been harried and exhausted, like she’d had a long lineup of late closes just like this one, and had nothing to look forward to except more of the same. He’d decided she had to have been his Alondra’s age, and she’d had a nice-sized diamond on her ring finger, no doubt something she had helped her fiancé get a store discount on. Her eyes had been tired, but she had made the effort to smile, and that, more than the time it had taken to walk to the store, or the time he had spent waiting, or even that which he was still wondering if he should purchase, was what made him stay.
When he had finished the transaction—after she had given him a nice discount—he had told her he wished her well with her nuptials. She had truly beamed then and talked about the man she was going to marry, the wedding planning, the dress. It was a deluge that he could tell she had to keep inside while she was working, and her joy, her youth, and all the things that were yet to come to her, the good and the bad, had made his eyes sting with tears.
It had been a relief to step outside and be able to blame the watering on the cold.
And now he was here, at this intersection, with a diamond cross his Ivelisse was going to kill him for buying for her, and a broken heart.
Alondra would have been twenty-three in January. And the cross wasn’t about any random wedding anniversary, even though he told himself it was, even though he had to believe it was—because otherwise he’d bought the thing to commemorate his daughter’s death four years ago on a snowy night just like this one, in the back of a car being driven too fast on ice, by her very best friend, who had survived.
Which would be rather morbid, wouldn’t it.
As he considered the accident that had taken such a precious gift from him and his wife and the other kids, he reflected that there were a number of dangerous things that could be predicted in life. If you took too many risks with your health, with your body, with your finances, with your habits, you were, statistically speaking, liable to get caught in a situation of your own design that came out badly. He knew this. He studied this; he trended this; he understood this from an overarching, objective viewpoint that was god-like. Yet none of that had mattered when his cousin Fernando had knocked on his front door at one a.m., on that snowy December night. The instant Raul had opened that door and seen that CPD hat being removed from that head, he had known.
He and Ivelisse had had a total of three children, and there had been many, mostly from the older generation, who had felt compelled to point out after the death that at least they still had two left. As if that erased the pain or lessened it by two-thirds. He had wanted to rage at their insensitivity, scream in their faces, tear their hair out. He loved his two surviving children, as much as he had loved his Alondra, but their lives did not make up for her loss. The whims of chance had coalesced into a tragedy that night, the combination of a lead foot and some black ice, coupled with the fact that Alondra had for some reason not put her seat belt on in the rear seat, leading to exactly the phenomenon that Raul assessed every weekday from nine to five.
Death had taken one of his own, and for a long time, he had been terrified that he was to blame. That somehow, because of the nature of his work, he had made a lightning rod out