“Why would anyone want to burn money, Ate?” Pinsan Jimmy’s pleading jumps out of the page I’m reading as I sit on a Queens-bound R train to fetch and take Dad to Elmhurst General Hospital for his dialysis treatment. Pinsan had volunteered to hold down the fort in San Juan, while devoted aunts and uncles and cousins took the annual Easter pilgrimage to Antipolo. Still half asleep early on Good Friday, Jimmy had to stop as he stepped into the living room. There underneath my Lola’s portrait lay crumpled remains of a peso bill. “Why would anyone want to burn money, Ate?” As if in a dream, he bent down to pick up the ashes, which disintegrated in his hands. He knew then, he said, that it was a message—a warning— from grandma Inang.

When I take his hand, how do I tell Dad?

Our ancestral home in San Juan was among fifty other houses swept into flames, triggered, the rumor goes, by a young child playing with matches next door. The smoke could still be smelled in towns kilometers away. Home a day after resurrection, disbelieving family had to seek shelter elsewhere. There were whispers that the fire was someone’s idea of replacing the old neighborhood with a commercial development. The communists also had something to gain from setting the crowded town ablaze.

Dad was tossing pansit noodles in a big wok and I was chopping scallions in the eat-in kitchen when he started recalling a movie he caught on their newly installed cable TV; the one about the 1986 People’s Power revolution in the Philippines. He was so struck, he said, by Ruben Rustia’s portrayal of Ferdinand Marcos and, most especially, by the revelation that the majority of the Filipino masses were behind the communists in their fight against the deposed dictator.

“Does that tell you anything?” I offer, obligingly, as I watch him stuff little brown paper bags into his blue canvas bag slung on the back of the chair. I let out a big sigh, I imagine like he did, when he finally saw me board the plane en route to New York that 104-degree day in late August. No more heated debates about Marcos. No more worrying about his daughter getting into trouble. No more worrying about his daughter getting lost.

“Oh there’s definitely a message there somewhere,” he replies, matter-of-factly. I help him slip his arms, first the left then the right, into his denim jacket. I watch his fingers struggle to insert each metal button into each hole and feel a tug. There was a time when his eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s, his arms firm and swinging with life, his tongue uncontrollably stinging. “Oh, he was really gago,” he follows up quickly and cleverly, as he rinses his hands on the kitchen sink. “How should I say it? Naughty. He was quite naughty.” He punctuates his last syllable with a flick of his hands and reaches for a paper towel.

Oh, God! Not even Rustia’s highly acclaimed performance will convince the movie-buff that Marcos was Judas in real life. I throw my hands in the air, walk past him to the living room and mutter something about calling the car service soon.

“Call a little later, have some lunch first.” He sets two mats and two bowls on the brown metal table. I shake my head. Too much, it’s too much. I clear the lump in my throat at the all-too-familiar aroma of Lola’s cooking, but my voice fails me.

“You know what the real problem in the Philippines is?” Dad continues, turns and inches his way back towards the stove. “No leadership. I don’t see anyone on the horizon.”

I stare at his back and hold back a chuckle. There’s hope yet. I pick up a fork. I know it. I concur. “We will have to wait until little Julia grows up.” I quickly look up, realizing what I just said, and catch the sudden gleam in his eyes, no doubt brought out by the slight mention of his grandchild.

Then, just as suddenly, I see the gleam fade and I look down and twirl a forkful of noodles into my mouth. “Well, I think bait bata should finish her education first,” he shoots back. He slowly pulls out a chair and sits across from me. “That’s why your Mom and I decided to make the sacrifice. That’s why we came to America. There are so many educational opportunities here. What opportunities are there in the Philippines, for you kids?”

I feel a sermon coming and dig my fork into the pansit. My tongue is just itching to deliver its own speech, like asking not what your country can do for you, and so on, and on, and on, but I catch a glimpse of the gauze taped along his shoulder blades barely hidden under the jacket collar.

My gaze blankly follows his frail figure as he slowly walks past me. Dad grabs the edge of the kitchen counter and stops for just a moment. He then takes two tentative steps towards the doorway post, against which he leans his right hand and then the full weight of his body. After what seems to be an eternity, Dad grasps the edge of the left post and takes to unsteady steps, and his feet land on the soft carpeted floor of the narrow hallway. He wobbles to the left and disappears from my view.

How do I tell him that he can no longer take his granddaughter’s hand and walk through our grandparents’ precious legacy?

Everything perished in the flames. My Lola’s faded but beautiful portrait taken when she was a young lass. Mom’s intricate wedding dress of soft lace. The sturdy unpolished furniture handed down through generations. Lolo’s labor of love all engulfed in flames.

“Wala. Nothing! Nobody is capable of leading the country any time in the foreseeable future,” I can hear him start again.

I get up and walk towards the window. I hear Dad in the bathroom, having his usual coughing fit. He has to release all that liquid they give him after every dialysis visit. As I look up to the sky, the picture becomes transparently clear. Dad needs this graft, an artificial link between artery and vein, his artificial link to life. If it gets blocked again, we have to keep going back to the hospital and to the doctors and to the nurses and have another one put in place, then another one, then another one after that—for as long as his body does not run out of sites and survive further operations. This gateway has to remain open and accessible to the other life-sustaining miracle called a dialysis machine, which will continually through artificially cleanse and rejuvenate Dad’s life blood, and which will buy all of us some precious time together.

I turn around to sit back down. I fold my arms. Everything else will have to wait.