Ramon Bustamante Returns Home

Ramon Bustamente stood by the wide bay window of his small condominium in Koreatown, Los Angeles, staring absently at the rustling fronds of a worn-out palm tree swaying against the golden smog of a late California afternoon. From this angle, the city always looked like a dream fraying at the edges—too loud, too fast, and far too young for a man like him.

It was Naomi’s story that wouldn’t let go of him. Not the modern one—some Hollywood Naomi with a heartbreak and a bottle of rosé—but the old Naomi, the one from scripture. The widow. The mother who had buried both her sons in foreign soil. She had no pension, no security net, no one left to hold her hand. She went back to Judea, because at least there, there was familiarity. A memory of home.

Ramon wasn’t much different.

There was a time, not long ago, when his sister Marietta and her two husbands—first the brutish one, later the gentler Matt—along with his friend Jim, had formed a makeshift circle of support. A motley crew of urban survivors, bound not by blood but by the gentle glances and silent assurances that aging didn’t have to mean solitude. Ramon, older than all of them by a good decade, often joked he was their spiritual dry run for old age. They would tease him, cook for him, sit on porches and share unimportant stories that felt important in the moment.

But fate, he thought bitterly, always trims the cast.

Marietta was now in hospice, her bright laughter reduced to vague memories and hospital whispers. Matt, whose health had always been shaky, was barely holding on. Jim was still around—but barely more than a ghost of companionship. He was kind, loyal, and perpetually broke, dependent on Ramon for housing, utilities, and the illusion of stability. Ramon knew that if it came down to it, Jim’s heart would be willing—but his hands would be empty.

So now, the path was starting to clear. Like Naomi, Ramon needed to go home.

Back to the Philippines. Back to the tropical rains and cousins who still remembered his voice. It had been thirty-four years. The thought was dizzying—like walking back into a room you left as a young man only to find your own ghost still sitting in the chair. But the logic was sound. Back home, he could live out his years in peace, with faces that looked like his, in a language that didn’t trip on his tongue. He could finally be surrounded by people who might not know all his stories, but at least shared his beginning.

Still, there were logistics.

He couldn’t abandon Jim just like that. Doing so would haunt him for the rest of his life. Jim would need stable housing. And then there were the properties—bits of California he had managed to hold onto, now waiting to be sold, their proceeds earmarked for a modest retreat somewhere near the desert borders: maybe Barstow, maybe Bullhead City. A place close to an airport, so he could come and go. He wasn’t closing the book on America—just dog-earing the page.

But his thoughts kept circling back to his sister Marietta, his only family in California.

He had imagined her final moments. Not in sterile detail, but in light. She would be drifting, perhaps, toward something radiant. A laughing breeze. A house with no corners. Maybe their parents were waiting for her, or their older brother, cracking jokes at heaven’s gate. Ramon tried to picture her not as she was—frail, exhausted, swollen with pain—but as she could now be: dancing, laughing, unburdened.

The grief, he reminded himself, belonged to the living. The dead were free.

And there were still things left to do for the living. Marietta, in her final years, had left him something: a modest IRA account. Her silent gesture. She couldn’t help much while she was alive—not for lack of love, but because life hadn’t given her much to give. Now Ramon would pass it on, quietly and with dignity, to the family she had so longed to support. His prayer was that she would be remembered, not for the years of silence or pain, but for this last, quiet kindness.

Perhaps, he thought, he could use a bit of that to pay off his own medical bills. Nothing outrageous—just $3,700. A strange kind of blessing, really. As though she were helping him, finally, in her own time.

His mind wandered again, not to the estate plans or real estate listings, but to their shared past. Marietta’s life in Los Angeles had not been kind. She arrived like an exotic bird clipped of its wings, her dreams of marriage and work and love smashed against the gritty realities of immigrant life. Skilled in nursing but naïve in love, she had married a man from the low end of humanity’s spectrum—a man who caged her spirit and narrowed her world to four walls and a ball of yarn.

For ten years she crocheted in silence.

It was only after they pushed the man out of her life that she began to heal. Her second love—her rescuer, later her husband—helped her walk again, literally and figuratively. They taught her to drive. She started laughing again. She talked about walking in the park. She even joined a gym.

Then came the sickness.

First the blood sugar spikes. Then the ketoacidosis. Toes were amputated. The cancer came next—silent, then screaming. Ramon remembered it all in excruciating detail. The elastic bandages, the breathless calls, the hospital beds, the silences that said more than any diagnosis ever could. Her voice had once filled their phone conversations with the gossip of siblings and tales of old neighbors. But in those final months, it shrank, like a house closing its windows one by one.

They had both been sick. They both knew it. And still, neither dared to say the worst aloud.

Now, with her journey nearly complete, Ramon stood alone in his apartment, surrounded by the hum of the refrigerator and the faint noise of a car alarm in the distance. He whispered a prayer not for himself, but for her. That she find her way into the light, quickly, painlessly. That she float, finally free.

He thought of her as a pioneer in a strange land, now heading home, like Naomi, like him.

The world would forget them in time. All of them. That was the natural order. But in the time left to him, Ramon Bustamente would make sure her memory lingered—softly, like the smell of cassava cake in a childhood kitchen, or the echo of a hymn sung far away.
2025-06-20 02:11:51
shortstories