Latisha's Children

On the March night they moved into the new house, after the five kids had explored every closet, flipped every light switch and finally gone to sleep in their new bedrooms, Joy and Manuel Perez opened a bottle of Korbel champagne on the living room floor. It was a rare private moment. They badly needed it.

When the couple married in 1997, they hadn't wanted more children. Joy, who was 10 years older than Manuel, had three already, including one still at home. The union between the take-charge woman with a ribald sense of humor and the intensely private man with a romantic streak and thick black mustache was to be about caring for each other, not children.

In time, the marriage collapsed over arguments about money and Manuel's habit of disappearing for days after they fought. Even so, he and Joy never stopped seeing each other. In the months before Latisha's death, they'd worked at reconciliation. They would go out to dinner or to their "love spot," a sandy bank on Harriet Island, to picnic, drop fishing lines into the Mississippi, watch boats pass and admire the view of the Cathedral.

Those quiet, simple pleasures were now in the past. Joy's grief and the relentless demands of her four grandchildren and 10-year-old son tested the limits of the couple's already fragile relationship.

SETTLING IN

Their full-time jobs became creating a home and daily routine for the children. At night, Joy and Manuel dropped into bed exhausted. Even their bedroom was just a den curtained off from the living room; the children got the real bedrooms. "The children come first," Joy told Manuel.

Manuel too was making big sacrifices. He had given up his apartment to move with Joy and the children into the new house. He also quit the job making boat trailers he'd held for seven years. It was a wrenching decision, but Joy couldn't handle things alone. There was nothing Manuel could do but stick by her side and hope things got better after the trial.

In many ways, he knew what she was going through. His brother had been murdered while staying at Manuel's apartment nearly a decade earlier.

At the new house, Manuel became the resident handyman. Within the first week, he installed a dishwasher. Next he put a sink and toilet in the basement, where 10-year-old Sterling had his room. He hung shelves for the china angels that Joy collected in memory of Latisha and installed rows of coat hooks in the porch.

He put up a basketball hoop and took down the above-ground swimming pool after 3-year-old Donte nearly toppled into it. He built a stout laundry line and a wood play structure with swings and a slide. At night, he rocked Nylah to sleep as they weaned her from her bottle.

When the weather turned warm, Manuel taught the boys, including little Donte, how to hit a ball with a bat. No one had ever shown them how. The children now called him "Grandpa."

As spring became summer, Joy planted a big garden: tomatoes, peas, celery, green beans, cabbage, broccoli, hot chili peppers for Manuel's mouth-scalding salsa and pumpkins for the children's jack-o-lanterns. Gardening was both relaxing and practical; they bought a chest freezer for the expected bounty. In the front yard, Joy planted a flower garden for Latisha. She nestled an angel statue among the purple petunias and taught the children to pick a flower for Mommy and tuck it in the angel's crossed arms.

Manuel wanted Joy to put the grief behind her. He wooed her with pink tulips, her favorite, and reset her necklace with two amethysts, Latisha's birthstone. But reminders of Latisha's absence were constant. Joy had only to turn on her cell phone, which flashed "Mom's phone." Latisha had programmed it because Joy was befuddled by electronic equipment.

STARTS AND STOPS

In the house, Joy posted handwritten rules -- take bath, brush teeth, no LYING, no temper tantrums. And the children grew. Michael and Marcus, now 8 and 6, shared an upstairs room and learned to make their beds with clean sheets and run their own bath water. Donte, now 4, started Head Start preschool and learned to dress himself. Two-year-old Nylah graduated from diapers to a potty.

The children rarely cried for their mother any more, but their grief and fear remained. Joy started taking them to a counselor named Tom Ellis at the Center for Grief in St. Paul. During weekly visits, the kids greeted Ellis with hugs and learned to describe their feelings by choosing a number on a scale of one to 10. In his cozy office in St. Paul's Midway, they let down their guard while playing with Legos and trays of heart-shaped rocks.

Ellis, who kept seeing the children even after their insurance stopping paying for his service, also helped Joy understand how the children's sadness could be triggered by seemingly unrelated events.

"For instance, I'll tell them "put your bike away.' That's something they just don't like doing. So they cry," said Joy. "But as they're crying, they end up putting their hurt for their mom into it too. ... Tom says let them cry. So I do. And sometimes now when what he said shoots through my mind, I'll go hug them."

One weekday afternoon, she and Manuel went to a rally at the state Capitol sponsored by the Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women. The couple stood at the edge of the rotunda as speakers recited sad statistics: 45 women and six children killed in Minnesota in 2000, at least 70 children left motherless.

Four of those children were Joy's grandchildren. As she listened, Joy leaned against a marble column and wept. Manuel put his hand on her shoulder.

After the speeches, volunteers wheeled out racks of white T-shirts, each bearing the name of a woman killed last year. As each woman's name was read, a relative or volunteer came forward, took a T-shirt, placed a red rose on the table and went to stand in a line encircling the rotunda. When Latisha's name was read, Joy stumbled forward in a teary daze, with Manuel following like a shadow. She lay down her rose, but could not join the circle of survivors. Instead, she thrust Latisha's T-shirt at a volunteer and rushed to the side of the gathering, where she sobbed before a display of Civil War flags as Manuel held her.

Joy's fresh grief opened Manuel's old wounds. His older brother, Ruben, had been murdered nine years earlier, shot to death while house-sitting in Manuel's apartment while Manuel was in Texas. Manuel had never gotten over his guilt. Why hadn't he been there? Could he have saved his brother? Manuel started drinking again, quietly slipping off to the garage with his six-packs.

One spring night, Manuel persuaded Joy to go out to dinner. They distributed the kids with four separate babysitters because no one would take them all. But the food had hardly arrived when the cell phone rang and they had to leave to pick up a child who was acting up. "We can't even go on a date," Manuel complained.

Joy understood his loss, but felt helpless to respond. Her attention was consumed by more pressing demands. The older boys had to testify about their mother's death before a grand jury. Joy was there to support them. Then she waited anxiously until the grand jury issued the indictment: first-degree murder. Marcus needed a hernia operation; Joy was at his side. She battled successfully to keep custody of the children after their imprisoned father decided he wanted them after all. To buy the house, she had to take first-time homeowner classes. Then, the county cut her food stamp allotment and she appealed the decision.

"I just feel so numb inside," she said one day as she stood in the kitchen cutting potatoes for the pot roast. She could see Manuel through the window, watering the new grass he had seeded over the bare spot where the pool had been. "I don't feel anything some days. I can't feel any love, like he wants me to."

SHARED AND SEPARATE GRIEF

Years before, when they first met, Manuel was attracted by Joy's big heart and habit of saying what she thinks. She loved his ability to dream. Occasionally, the spark between them still showed. At their house closing, a joyful day, they sat side by side and recalled their courtship.

Manuel happened to be downtown waiting for a bus at 6 a.m., Joy explained as she put her hand on his arm. She was working at Dayton's as a janitorial supervisor. Although they knew each other, they had lost touch, but he spotted her through the locked glass doors, where she pushed a floor scrubber.

"Do you know who I am?" shouted Manuel, banging on the door.

"Sure!" Joy yelled back.

He asked for her phone number.

"Now here comes my boss," said Joy, giggling at the memory. "And I'm yelling "7-2-3 ...'"

"And here comes my bus, and I'm going "Hurry up. Hurry up!' " said Manuel.

"And then the second week he came over and he has never left since," said Joy, turning to give him a bright look. He met her eyes and smiled back.

One day in June, Joy went grocery shopping at Steve's Warehouse, a discount store on White Bear Avenue. She was gleeful to be out alone, momentarily without kids or worries.

"This is my job," she said, steering her cart through the aisles as "Hotel California" drifted over the speakers. "My job is to take care of these children and in order to do that and do it well, I have learned where the bargains are." She picked up a few 99-cent boxes of macaroni and cheese with instructions in Spanish.

"Who cares! The kids go through it," she said. Next, she grabbed 12 cans of Campbell's tomato soup decorated with snowmen and left over from Christmas, two for $1.

Turnip and collard greens were 39 cents a can. Before leaving, she added one last item to the loaded cart -- a red plastic scrub-brush to clean Latisha's grave.

Manuel was watering the yard when she pulled up at the house. On the spur of the moment, they decided to visit the cemetery where her daughter and Manuel's brother were buried. Joy's nephew Steven agreed to watch all the children.

At Elmhurst Cemetery, Joy followed the winding road past monuments and expanses of clipped grass and finally parked at the top of a slope in the shade of a tree. Latisha's grave was next to the road -- a lush green rectangle.

"I thank God he let me have her 25 years," she said, straightening an angel and pinching a few faded blossoms from the impatiens planted around the grave stone. "He didn't have to let me have her at all."

Then she and Manuel walked up the road and around a curve to Manuel's brother's grave. They stood in silence, united in loss.

Manuel's gaze drifted to the well-tended grave of a young man, a few rows over where a rose bush was blooming. "Look at that," he said. "It's a purple rose."

"Now, you know his mama loved him," said Joy, recognizing another mother's tender impulse. "You know that's his mama's plant."