It took forty minutes. Aurelio sat in the gaming chair, which Kiara had carried back up the stairs by herself, and supervised every nail. Easy. Easy. There. Now the next one. Twice he forgot what they were doing and asked why that man was breaking the closet, and both times Luz knelt down by the chair and said, We're taking Abuela's birthday with us, and both times he said, Oh. Good. Good, and went back to supervising. Kiara held the shim. Inez stood against the far wall under the photographs with her arms crossed and watched her father's hands, which moved in the air as he talked, shaping the work.
When the last nail came free, Mr. Bek lifted the strip of trim away from the frame and held it out flat across his palms, the way you'd hand someone a folded flag, and Aurelio took it onto his lap.
He ran his thumb up the pencil marks, all of them, from INEZ 3 to LUZ 12.
"Lucecita," he said. "You didn't get measured."
"There's no frame now, Abuelo."
"So?" He held up the trim. "Stand against it. Your mother holds it."
So Inez held the strip of pine flat against the bare wall where the closet frame had been, and Luz stood with her back to it, and Kiara put a paperback from the spilled BOOKS box flat on top of her head, and Aurelio Montoya, with Mr. Bek's hand under his elbow to steady him, made a pencil mark and wrote, very slowly, in capitals that ran downhill: LUZ 13 — 2026.
Then he held the pencil out to her.
"Now you," he said. "Do your mother."
Inez said, "Papi, no, I'm forty-four," and Aurelio said, "Your mother would want it," and that was the end of that. Luz held the trim. Her mother stood against it. Luz had to reach up on her toes to lay the book on her mother's head; she was still two inches short. She drew the line, and wrote, and her hand was shaking, and when Inez stepped away and turned around they both looked at what Luz had written: INEZ 44 — 2026, twenty-eight years above INEZ 16.
"Ay," said Aurelio, peering at it, delighted. "She's going to be taller than me."
And it was that — not the notebook, not the doorframe, not any of it, just that one sentence, Pilar's sentence, coming out of his mouth on her birthday in a room he'd painted with his granddaughter — that finally broke Inez Montoya in half. She slid down the bare wall and sat on the carpet among the spilled paperbacks with her face in her cardigan sleeves and cried the way she had not cried in eighteen months, not at the neurologist's, not at Briarwood, not in the Methodist basement, not in the car in front of the apricot tree. Great ugly heaving sobs, the kind with sound in them.