My mother put the mug down on the counter. Very carefully, as if the counter were glass. Then she turned around, and I saw her face, and I knew before she said anything that something was wrong, because my mother has a face that does not do anything it doesn't decide to do. Twenty years of walking into other people's houses had taught her that. She could stand in a kitchen in Ridgefield while a woman in tennis whites told her the grout was dingy, and nothing would move in her face at all. Now her mouth was doing something. Her eyes were red at the rims and she had put concealer under them, badly, in a hurry.
"Not yet, Maya," she said.
"Not yet it didn't come, or not yet—"
"Not yet." She held one hand up, flat, the way she did when Iker was about to run into the street. "Sit down, mija. Please. Just sit down one minute."
I didn't sit down. I remember that very clearly. I remember thinking that if I sat down, whatever it was would happen, and if I stayed standing next to the orange pack by the back door, it wouldn't. I remember the refrigerator humming. I remember the wren.
"Is it the flight?" I said. "Did they cancel the flight? Because Dr. Brindle would have called me, she has my cell, she—"
"It's not the flight."
"Then what? Mami, what? Did something happen to Abuelita? Did—"
And then I heard my father on the stairs.
My father is a big man, and he has always come down stairs like a big man, all at once, the treads complaining. Not that morning. That morning he came down slowly, one step and then a pause and then another, the way you come down stairs when you are carrying something you are afraid to drop. I turned around. My mother made a sound behind me, a small one, like someone had pressed on a bruise.
He was still in the clothes he'd had on yesterday, his work jeans gray with tile dust at the knees, a T-shirt from the stone yard in Brookfield where he'd been buying his marble for fifteen years. He hadn't shaved. He hadn't slept, I think. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on the newel post, and in his other hand, held a little out from his body, almost formally, the way an altar boy holds a candle, he had a small dark booklet with a gold seal on the cover.
For one second I felt my whole body go light with relief. It came. It's here. He had it all along, he was keeping it to surprise me, he was going to make a whole thing of it, that was so him.