Ang Mga Patakaran

The first thing you must understand is that our house has two doors, and only one of them opens. The front door is for people. The kitchen door was nailed shut by my great-grandfather in 1936, from the outside, at noon, with the priest watching — and every year on the ninth of October my lola repainted it, sweetly, in fresh blue, the way you keep a grave.

I was eleven the year I learned why, which in our family is the traditional age: old enough to keep the rules, young enough to still be teachable about the cost of breaking them.

It was the wet season. The radio had died at dusk, mid-sentence, which my lola noted the way farmers note birds going quiet. She lit the lamp, took her embroidery down from the wall — the framed rules, which I had believed all my childhood were a decoration — and set them on the table between us like a document I was finally of age to sign.

RULE ONE, in red thread: The first knock is not for you. Do not stand. Do not look at the door. The first knock is a question asked of the house, and the house knows how to be silent. It has had practice.

RULE TWO, in blue: The second knock belongs to people. A neighbor, a cousin, a stranger soaked to the bone — on the second knock you may open, because whatever it is that visits, it cannot knock twice. Two is an honest number. Two is the pulse. This is why we answer on the second, always have, always will, and why the town's children are taught to knock twice at every door, twice, firmly, from the age they can reach the wood.

RULE THREE had no color. The thread was old, older than the sampler around it, and whoever stitched it pressed hard enough to pucker the cloth: If the third knock comes, the visit is no longer a question.

I asked what happened at three. My lola picked up her coffee, and I watched her decide — I actually watched the decision cross her face, the way you watch weather cross a field — between the kind lie and the useful truth.

"At three," she said, "it has stopped asking the house. At three, anak, it is asking YOU. And the third knock is very hard not to answer, because it does not sound like knocking anymore. It sounds like someone you love, saying your name, in the voice they used when you were small."

The rain went on. The lamp did its small work. And at nine minutes past nine — I checked, because eleven-year-olds check — something arrived on the porch out of the wet, settled itself, and knocked once, beautifully, and my lola put one finger on my wrist and went on embroidering, and the two of us sat there inside RULE ONE while the house, which has had practice, held its breath around us.

We are still, you will have noticed, waiting on the second knock. That was thirty years ago. It is the waiting, my lola always said, that the rules are really for.