Dawn had brought Aurelio over in the Briarwood van. He sat at the end of the hallway in the Walgreens windbreaker and a paper birthday hat Kiara had insisted on, looking at the trim.
He didn't know it was Pilar's birthday. They told him, and he said, "Ah," and nodded, and they could see him not remembering, and that was all right.
"Lucecita," Inez said. "Stand up straight."
Luz stood against the trim. Kiara, who had come with a plate of her mother's banana bread and a paperback for exactly this purpose, laid the book flat on her head. Inez made the mark. It was an inch and three-quarters above LUZ 13, and a little crooked.
"Ay," Aurelio said, from his chair, out of nowhere, out of some deep place where certain sentences survive after everything else has been packed away. "She's going to be taller than you."
Inez stood still with the pencil in her hand.
Then she turned around and held it out to her daughter, and Luz took it. And Inez stepped back against the wall, against the old pine, and stood up straight, and closed her eyes — not exhausted this time, and not guilty, or not only — and waited for the book.
Luz lifted it. Held it there a second. Then she lowered it again, and looked at her mother's face, which was right there, an inch and a quarter above her own, and which was looking back at her.
"Mom," Luz said. "Can we just talk for a second?"
And her mother, who had a shift at seven, and a van coming back at five, and a hundred things to do, slid down the wall onto the hallway carpet and sat, and patted the floor beside her.
"Yes," Inez said. "Sit. I've got time."