A knock from the door suddenly interrupts Inang Maya’s deep reverie.
It is Priscilla, now a debutante at eighteen, and fast appearing more and more like her Inang when the matriarch was then the mainland’s maiden candidate for the traditional Suyonon festival of their patron saint San Agustin. Inang Maya remembers how, wearing her favorite colorful patadyong dress then, she has been once partnered with a handsome gentleman in a benang-woven camisa de chino whose name is Renato Ricablanca Baylon.
“Hi, Lalay! Did you take your medicine already?”
Inang Maya shows the left hand to her niece and repeatedly taps the tip of her middle finger on her open palm; then, with the right hand pointing to the dextrose holo-bottle hanging from the stand, gingerly beams. There is nary a single drop of l
