Nobody tried to stop her. Mr. Bek went quietly downstairs. Kiara went and stood on the landing with her back to the room. Aurelio leaned forward in the gaming chair and put his big upholsterer's hand on top of his daughter's head, the way you'd lay a book there to measure, and left it.
Luz sat down on the carpet next to her mother. Not touching. Close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. That was what she could do. It was more than she'd been able to do an hour ago and less than she wanted to, and she sat inside the space between those two things and let her mother cry.
The rest of the day happened the way days like that happen, which is to say both much faster and much slower than they should have.
Kiara called her mother. Toni Gaines arrived at 3:40 in her hospital scrubs, straight off a shift in the cardiac unit at Presbyterian, took one look at the hallway and said, "Okay. Who's driving the truck, and is it me," and it was her. She and Mr. Bek and Kiara loaded the last of the lavender room in twenty-five minutes flat, Mr. Bek handing down the thirty-one frames from the gallery wall one by one and Kiara wrapping each in a towel without being asked, and then Toni drove the truck to the apartment on Montgomery with Kiara riding shotgun to direct her, and returned it to the place on Menaul at 5:51, and texted Inez a photo of the receipt with no words at all, just a thumbs-up and a heart.
Mr. Bek stood on the porch while Inez locked the front door for the last time. She stood there with the key in her hand. Then she held it out to him.
"There's a trick," she said. "In the fall. You have to lift up on the knob a little when you turn it, or it sticks. He always said he'd plane it."
"I'll lift up on the knob," said Mr. Bek. He took the key. "I won't plane it. Not this year." He hesitated, then reached into his jacket and took out a coffee can, an old red Folgers can with holes punched in the bottom, filled with dirt. Sticking out of the dirt was a thin brown stick with two leaves on it. "I took this in July," he said, "when I came to look. I hope it's okay. I didn't know if you would want it, and I didn't want to ask again and make you sad. It's from the apricot. It's rooted. You plant it in spring. Or you don't. It's yours."
Inez took the coffee can in both hands. She couldn't say anything. He seemed to understand that, too.
They drove Aurelio back to Briarwood at five, Inez at the wheel of the old Corolla, Luz in the back seat beside her grandfather with the doorframe trim across both their laps like a seatbelt. He fell asleep before they reached Tramway. His head tipped onto Luz's shoulder. She sat very still the whole way so she wouldn't wake him, and watched the back of her mother's head, and the back of her mother's neck where the tight curls had come loose, and her mother's eyes in the rearview mirror, which kept finding hers and then going back to the road.
Dawn met them at the garden gate. She was younger than Luz had expected, maybe thirty, with a sunflower tattoo on her wrist and a lanyard full of keys, and she did not scold anybody. She crouched by the car door and said, "Mr. Aurelio. You went on an adventure," and he woke up and blinked at her and said, "I went home. It's my wife's birthday," and Dawn said, "Then happy birthday to her," as though that were the most reasonable thing in the world.
Then she looked up at Inez over the roof of the car and said quietly, "It happens a lot, the first couple months. They go to the place they're sure of. It doesn't mean you did anything wrong. We're going to fix the latch on that gate. That one's on us."