Rosita was built like her brothers, though I’d seen pictures of her wedding to Manny and she’d been a tiny slip of a girl, but that’s what can happen when you marry a girl before she’s stopped growing taller. She’d been a couple inches below his five foot six once, but now she was five-eight or maybe five-nine, and three children plus several miscarriages had broadened the rest of her, but Manny gazed up at her as if she were still the delicate girl he’d fallen in love with as they danced, his head resting on her ample bosom. The drinks had been flowing enough that she didn’t make him move his head now.
Connie, the bride, and Mercedes, her sister and maid of honor, were built like Manny’s lean and wiry frame, but tall like models thanks to Rosita. They were talking excitedly across the room. Their brother, Tomas, sat in a corner across the room in the wheelchair that Connie had finally persuaded him to use. The crutches he’d used to walk up the aisle were leaning by the chair, his hand on them, so he’d know he could get back up. He was thirteen and had never been badly hurt before; the first time is an eye-opener. He’d used crutches to stand in church, proud to be on the groom’s side, but by the time the ceremony was over he’d been pale and sweating. Getting shot will do that to you, even if it was a few weeks ago. He’d missed going to State with his track-and-field team because a bad guy had kidnapped Connie and him. I’d been part of the team that had stopped the bad guy and gotten them out, but not before he’d shot Tomas and left him for dead.