Some mornings they fought. Once, in November, Luz said, You only call Ms. Ashby back now because it makes you feel better, and her mother said, That's not fair, and Luz said, A lot of things aren't, and they rode the rest of the way in a silence so thick you could have stacked boxes on it. Forgiveness, it turned out, did not arrive. It accrued, like the pencil marks on the trim, a fraction of an inch at a time, and some years you didn't grow at all.
Kiara came over on Saturdays. The white-walled bedroom fit one gaming chair, barely, so Kiara took hers home and announced the two chairs were in a long-distance relationship. Toni Gaines said absolutely not and then put it in her living room under a crocheted throw, and Kiara reported that her mother sat in it every night to watch the news and denied it to everyone.
Luz did not put the headset back on. Kiara didn't ask her to. They played board games instead, mostly badly, at the new kitchen table, which Mr. Bek had driven over one Sunday and reassembled because, he said, he'd seen it in pieces on the truck and it had been bothering him. His wife, Halina, came with him and told Inez the apartment got the morning light, which was the only light that mattered.
Once or twice a week they went to Briarwood. Some days Aurelio knew them both. Some days he knew Luz and called Inez Pilar, and Inez answered to it without flinching, and on the drive home Luz reached over and held her hand at the light by the Smith's, and neither of them mentioned it. Some days he knew no one, and was polite to them both, and told Luz all about his granddaughter, who was very smart and lived in a purple room.
In December, Ms. Ashby's class did a unit called Maps of Home, a map of your house from memory. Luz sat in front of the blank paper for the whole period. Ms. Ashby crouched next to her desk and said, "What if it isn't a floor plan? What if it's the one thing you'd carry out of a fire?"
Luz went home that afternoon and asked her mother if she could borrow the doorframe.
They hung it in the hallway of the apartment on Montgomery in January, on the wall between Luz's room and her mother's. There was no closet there and no door. It was just a strip of old pine trim screwed to white drywall with four brass screws, running from knee height to just above Inez's head, and if you didn't know what it was you would think the people who lived there had very strange taste in decoration.
Mr. Bek put it up. He brought a level and a shim. "You don't mark another man's wall," he said, putting the shim behind the drill, and Inez laughed and then had to look away.
Luz's art project had been a photograph of it laid flat on the floor of Ms. Ashby's classroom, every mark labeled in chalk on the tile beside it, a whole family's growing up in a single line. It hung in the district show at the Albuquerque Museum, where Aurelio, on a good day in February, stood in front of it for a long time and told a stranger, "I did this trim. Nobody ever painted it." When she said it was beautiful, he said, "It's just wood," and tapped the frame twice, and smiled.
On the sixth of October, a year to the day, the three of them stood in the hallway of the apartment on Montgomery.
It had not been a good year, exactly. Aurelio had a fall in March and was in a wheelchair most days now. The Medicaid bed had come through in the spring, a mercy Inez cried about almost as hard as everything else. Luz had started ninth grade. She and her mother still fought sometimes in the car, and most of the fights were no longer about August, which Ms. Ashby said was how you knew it was healing: when the fights went back to being about curfew. The apricot cutting had been planted in a pot on the balcony in April, and had put out nine leaves, and then lost them all in a heat wave, and then, in September, astonishingly, put out three more.