Velas Part 3

As she turned to go back inside, an image of four candles lying on the counter popped into my head. Yeah, we had four unused ones right? That was plenty.

"Hey, don't we already have enough?" I called after her.

"Remember, we're having company tonight." She smiled like she always does when she says something like that. "Company" came really a lot of the time. Sometimes we had neighbors over, sometimes Senor Juan or Senora Andrea and her two children. And there were some other people there that we knew. We had a rule that, in order to save money, we were allowed to use no more than four candles at once. When people came over, it went up to seven.

Hm, I used to take the candle-ends up to my bed up high and read with them till they flickered and went out. They really don't attract as many bugs as flashlights do, and for me they were gratis.

I didn't really care who was coming to our house. I liked walking to the tienda though, even if it just consisted of little counter like a fruit stand although it was backed by a badly kept house. It must have been really depressing to live there--but who knows! I'd never been inside.

I touched Asaph's arm and he followed me out of the house. It was often so noisy inside what with four children under the age of ten that we just nodded at each other or made a certain motion to indicate that we wanted the other to step out so we could speak.