"Mom," Luz said. Her voice came out wrong, cracked down the middle. She had promised herself she wouldn't cry today. She had promised Kiara, who had said, You can cry, it's allowed, and Luz had said, Not in front of her. "Mom, please. Can we just talk for a second?"
Her mother picked up a third box from the floor, LUZ — MISC, the one Luz had packed last night at one in the morning and taped shut so that nobody, not even herself, would have to look inside it again. She set it on top of the other two. The stack came up to Luz's chin.
"Mom."
Her mother turned away and started pulling the thumbtacks out of the corkboard by the door, dropping them one by one into a sandwich bag. Click. Click. Click.
Luz stood there with the boxes. She could smell the cardboard, that dry papery smell, and under it the lavender paint that had never fully lost its smell, and under that, very faintly, the cedar and coffee smell of her grandfather that was in all the walls of this house and would not be in the walls of the apartment. Something in her chest gave way like a shelf with too much on it. She put her face down on the top box, right on the black marker letters, and sobbed into it. The cardboard went soft and dark under her cheek.
Click, went the thumbtacks. Click.
Out on the landing, Kiara Gaines had been pretending to look at her phone.
She had come over at eight to help, and her mother had said through the car window, You be useful, and you be quiet, that woman has enough. So she'd been useful. She'd carried the lamp. She'd wrapped the plates in newspaper while Ms. Montoya counted them under her breath. Now she was standing at the top of the stairs with one hand on the white wooden railing, the one with the chipped spot where Luz had rammed her scooter into it in third grade, giving the two of them room. She could hear Luz crying. It was a sound she had heard maybe four times in six years of friendship, and every time it made her want to fight someone, and there was nobody here to fight.
She looked away, out the round window at the top of the stairs, down onto the front walk and the cottonwood.
A man was coming up the walk.
He was old and narrow, in a tan windbreaker zipped to the throat, brown slacks, and house slippers. Plaid house slippers, on the concrete, in October. He was walking slowly, carefully, the way you walk on ice, and he was carrying a white paper bag from the pharmacy, swinging it a little, like a man coming home from an errand. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at the house, and his face did a thing Kiara would remember for the rest of her life: it lit. Like somebody had found the switch.
Kiara's hand went to her mouth.