"I noticed. I'll fix them a little."
"Don't fix them too much." Aurelio narrowed his eyes. "She liked the sound."
"Then I won't," Mr. Bek said, and Inez, standing on the patio, had to turn around and look at the wall of the house for a while.
He did not ask why her father was in slippers or why there was a gaming chair on the lawn or why her daughter, who had come out behind her, had a face like a burst tomato. He only took his hands back out of his pockets and looked at the truck through the side gate and said, "How far are you?"
"Not far enough," Inez said. "His room. Her room. The garage is done."
"The truck goes back today?"
"By six. On Menaul."
He nodded and looked at his watch, a big steel one with a cracked crystal. "I am not in a hurry," he said. "My wife doesn't come down until next week. The house is not going anywhere. I'm going to stand here and be in nobody's way. You tell me what to carry and I carry it, or you tell me to go sit in my car and I go sit in my car. Okay?"
Inez opened her mouth to say That's not necessary, which was what she had said to the neighbors with casseroles in August, to her ex-husband Raúl calling from Denver with money he didn't have, to everyone.
"Okay," she said instead. "Thank you. Okay."
It was Aurelio who decided what happened next. Afterward, everyone agreed on that.
He had been quiet under the tree, turning the empty pharmacy bag over and over in his hands, and then he looked up at Luz and said, in a voice so clear and so ordinary that it made all four of them go still, "Mija. Go get me a pencil. It's your grandmother's birthday."