That day my grandfather signed at eleven. He signed the paper in the square, in front of the union headquarters, with a pen a federal official handed him, a man who had come in from Hermosillo by car. The official was young. His shoes were clean. My grandfather looked at him the way he used to look at the shift bosses of the mine when he was a boy. No grudge, no respect. Just like that.

The square was full. There were the ones who had stayed, the last of them, about a hundred old men. My grandfather would say, we are a hundred, but we were two thousand. I didn’t correct him. I knew the exact number. They had held out for eighteen years. Eighteen, compadre: eighteen. A child born on the first day of the strike is of age today. The official from Hermosillo read the names from the folder out loud. He read them in alphabetical order. When he reached the O, he reached my grandfather. He didn’t look him in the face. He looked at the signature. My grandfather’s signature is a big O, then a flat line, then three dots. He never learned to write it any other way.

My grandfather’s name is Efraín Osorio. Men his age call him Don Efraín, men mine call him Don Efrito, because nobody remembers his middle name anymore. He is seventy-eight years old. He has been a widower since 2014. My father died of silicosis three years ago. My grandfather has outlived everyone he should have outlived less than.

After the square, my grandfather said he was walking home. It’s three blocks. I told him I was going with him. He answered, come along, but don’t talk. We walked like that. In silence for three blocks. Dogs barked. I can’t say whether at us.

At home, my grandfather took off his shoes on the veranda and lined them up against the wall. That was how he always set them down. We went in. The house was as it always was, the October 2024 calendar still on the wall, my grandmother’s holy cards framed on the fridge, the mug with the broken handle next to the sink. I made two coffees. Not the good coffee, but the jar coffee, the everyday kind, the kind my grandfather had always drunk. Don Efraín doesn’t drink the good coffee at home. He says the good coffee you drink out, at the bar by the mine. Said. The bar by the mine has been closed since 2019.

We went into my grandmother’s room, which was also the wardrobe room. There were three wardrobes. My grandmother’s, my father’s, my grandfather’s. My grandfather had never opened his in front of me when I was a child. He opened it now, for the first time in eighteen years. Inside there was only a set of overalls. Blue miner’s overalls, the collar torn along the seam. On the collar, in black marker, a number: 1204. That number was his. It was from 2007, from the last shift.

The overalls fell off the hanger. I don’t know if because the hanger was old or because my grandfather pulled them. They fell. I bent down to pick them up. My grandfather stood still. I took them, shook them to get the dust off, and said, Grandpa, you already handed it in. To me, three winters. And to you, eighteen years.

You get it, compadre.

My grandfather didn’t answer. He stayed seated. Then he stood up. He took the overalls from my hands. He folded them in three. First the left sleeve to the chest. Then the right sleeve over it. Then he folded it in half at the shoulders. Three folds. He hung it back on the hanger. Not the way he used to keep it. The way I kept it as a boy, when my grandmother would let me fold it in the morning before school.

I didn’t point it out to him. I let him do it.

At the union social club, that evening, I brought a beer to three friends of mine. Men in their twenties, sons of other miners. I told them the day. I told them three things, in order. My grandfather signed in front of the official with the clean shoes. My grandfather opened the wardrobe and the overalls fell. My grandfather folded the overalls the way I used to fold them at six. Then I drank my beer. My friends said nothing. They stayed quiet. One of them made the gesture of the open hand, of thanks, the way the old men do in Cananea when they don’t know what to say.