away, so the boys were left to the lenient care of Gina and their father’s younger brother, whom they called Uncle Junior. Their grandmother was to come over and take them to church that afternoon. Gina didn’t make French toast the way their mother did, so for breakfast the boys only took a few bites of the eggy bread and quickly went on their way. The procession lurched on. They skirted the compost pit, past the charred stump of the atis tree that had to be set on fire because it became infested with hairy caterpillars that made Angelo break out in hives. Uncle Junior led the way. Tony liked him well enough when he wasn’t drunk, and he hadn’t been drunk for more than a week already. Tony’s grandmother naturally took this as a sign that God was bringing him closer to a reinvention, blind as she was to the fact that Junior’s personal demons were far stronger than her faith. The boys had fashioned a cross out of the halves of a bamboo pole. Angelo carried it on his right shoulder, plodding, pretending it weighed him down. They were in the backyard now, and he kept tripping over the exposed roots that made the land uneven. Every time he stumbled, the crown—a halo of orange nylon rope—tilted on his head. Tony was still upset over this. Uncle Junior and Gina had thrown away the crown of thorns that he had made from the stems of their neighbor’s bougainvillea, which grew over the cyclone wire fence that bordered the backyard. They both insisted that this was going to be just a harmless reenactment, something that the family would laugh 22