Inez closed her eyes. "Yes."
"That's not okay."
"No," her mother said. "It isn't."
They sat there on the carpet on either side of the open box. Neither of them reached across it. Luz wanted to; part of her wanted to so badly that her hands hurt. But a larger part of her was standing very still and refusing, and she let it, because it seemed to her that if she reached across right now she would be doing the thing again — handling it, carrying it, making it fine so that her mother wouldn't have to.
Through the window came the sound of a car door shutting, and then, from the backyard, Kiara's voice, high and alarmed: "Ms. Montoya? There's a man here. I think it's the new guy. He's early."
Stanislaw Bek was sixty-three years old and had been early to everything in his life, including, his wife liked to say, his own birth, in the back of a Fiat outside Rzeszów. He had allowed forty minutes for traffic from his daughter's place in Rio Rancho and there had been none. He had parked across the street and sat in his car, telling himself he would not go to the door until three. Then he had seen, through the side gate, a girl in a denim jacket pushing an old man in a gaming chair around a backyard, and something about the way the old man was pointing at the tree had made him get out of the car.
He stood at the side gate with his hands in his pockets, the way you stand near a horse you don't know.
"I'm sorry," he said when Inez came out the back door. "I'm too early. I'll go. I'll come back."
"No — no, it's fine, I — " Inez stopped. She had her work voice ready, the one for customers whose insurance had lapsed, and it would not come. "This is my father. Aurelio Montoya. Papi, this is Mr. Bek. He's — " She could not say the man who bought your house. "He's a friend."
"I'm the man who bought your house," said Mr. Bek, because it seemed to him that the old man in the chair was looking at him and already knew, and that it would be an insult to pretend otherwise. He came through the gate and crossed the yard and held out his hand. "It's a good house. You built the back porch yourself. I could tell from the joints."
Aurelio looked at the hand for a long moment, and then shook it. His grip was still strong. An upholsterer's grip.
"Pilar wanted a porch," he said. "I put the boards too close. They swell in August."