"Not tonight," she said finally. "But — ask me again. Okay? Ask me again tomorrow."
There was a long pause on the other side of the door.
"Okay," her mother said. "I'll ask you tomorrow."
And she did.
She asked the next day, and the day after that, and Luz said not yet both times, and her mother said okay both times and didn't push, which was new, and which Luz noticed.
On Thursday, Inez called Wren Ashby back. Six months late. She did it on speaker at the kitchen counter with Luz sitting right there, which Luz understood was on purpose, and she started by saying, "Ms. Ashby, this is Luz Montoya's mother, you called me in April and I never called you back and I'm calling to say you were right and I'm sorry," all in one breath, like ripping off tape.
Ms. Ashby was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Ms. Montoya, I've been teaching eighth-grade art for nineteen years. Do you know how many parents call me back six months later to say I was right?" And Inez said, "None?" And Ms. Ashby said, "You're the second. The first one was my mother." And Inez laughed, a startled bark of a laugh, and Luz, who hadn't heard her mother laugh since July, looked down at the counter so nobody would see her face.
It was Ms. Ashby who knew about the transfer form: you could stay at your old school if a parent could provide transportation. She filled half of it out herself and dropped it at the district office on her lunch break. So Luz stayed at Cleveland for eighth grade, with Kiara, with Ms. Ashby's art room and its smell of turpentine and burnt coffee, and the price of it was that every morning Inez had to drive her twenty-six minutes across town before her shift, and every afternoon Toni Gaines or Kiara's older brother drove her home.
The twenty-six minutes turned out to be the thing.
They didn't plan it. For the first week they mostly listened to the radio. Then one morning on Montgomery, stopped at the light by the Smith's, Luz said, without looking over, "I'm still mad at you." And her mother said, "I know." And Luz said, "Like, really mad. Not in a cute way." And her mother said, "I know, mija. You can be." And the light changed, and that was all, and it was more than they had said to each other in two months.
After that it came in pieces, twenty-six minutes at a time. Luz told her about the milk in the oven. Inez told her about the night of the posole and the promise, which Luz had never heard, and which made her understand something about her mother's face in the hallway that she hadn't understood before. Luz said, one morning in the rain, that she sometimes still woke up at two and listened for a bell, and then remembered there wasn't a door anymore, and lay there anyway. Her mother pulled the car over into the parking lot of a Discount Tire and sat with her for eleven minutes and Luz was late to first period, and Inez wrote her a note that said, in full, Luz was late because I needed her. — I. Montoya, and Ms. Ashby, who saw it on the attendance desk, pinned a copy of it to the corkboard in her classroom without a word.