The Importance of a Piece of Paper

Description

In the title story, two siblings must face the brother who has betrayed them by selling his share of the family land and forsaking a centuries-old land grant, leaving an entire community vulnerable. In "The Three Sons of Julia," a long-suffering mother, whose one request is that all her sons come home to the barrio for the Fourth of July, watches her dream shatter as two of her sons - one a successful businessman with a white wife and the other a hard-drinking ex-con - nearly destroy her house, and each other, by the night's end. In "Runaway," a young orphan discovers the consolations of fraternity when he is forced to care for a boy whose circumstances are even more dire than his own.