On our ofrenda, I place chocolate, agua, mezcal, and beer among the photographs of our dead. Coors isn’t sold in Oaxaca, so I put a Victoria instead. I think Daddy would have liked it. As I light the copal, white smoke rises. Its sweet smell reaches my nose. Under a golden archway of caña and flores, Daddy’s face stares at me from under his white baseball cap. His once-brown eyes have turned gray, his chestnut hair now the color of a life lived hard. I pluck petals from cempasúchil letting them fall to the floor. I make a path from the ofrenda to the door, hoping they will lead us to each other, if just for a night.

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I cut eggs into slivers over toast, spreading the pieces like they’ll somehow make the dry crumbs palatable. My dad says, whoa-my-god, it’s coming toward me—his idea of hilarious. He pinches the underside of my arm hard enough to leave a bruise as I swallow the guts of the tomato, chugging cup after cup of coffee because it’s free and diminishing the hunger is worth the anxious churn of caffeine-induced heartburn. The coffee burns my throat but doesn’t loosen my voice and I don’t tell my father to go to hell, that I hope he dies on his way to work.

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