She had decided to name this year’s jack-o’-lantern after her husband. She remembered how much her own mother’d enjoyed Halloween, sharing it with her daughter and teaching her its liberating spirit: “And now, who’s the biggest pumpkin-head in our lives, Aline? Who do we dislike this year?” Aline would name some current neighbourhood bully or some rival classmate, and her papa would call from the living room with the name of a current politician or his boss, and her mother would cackle with glee and suggest her sister-in-law, or Aline’s babysitter—whom she’d caught flirting with Papa—and then her mother showed Aline how much fun it was to stick a knife into a pumpkin named for an antagonist. Aline’s mother loved Halloween. It was the one day in her proper Catholic existence when she didn’t feel bound by her social constrictions as a woman. It was practically the only time she laughed aloud, and she sang as she prepared for the trick-or-treating. She smoked cigarettes.
