She didn't drop them so much as forget them. They went down in a landslide, BOOKS on the bottom splitting at the corner, DESK STUFF spilling a cup of pens across the carpet, MISC landing upright and unopened like it knew better. She was past her mother before her mother could move, past Kiara on the landing, taking the stairs two at a time with one hand skidding on the railing.
He was standing just inside the door with the pharmacy bag, a shape against the light, and then he was her grandfather: the white hair combed wet the way the aides combed it, the windbreaker she had bought him at Walgreens for his birthday, the slippers. There was a leaf stuck to one of the slippers. His glasses were on a cord around his neck, which was new; at Briarwood they put everyone's glasses on cords.
"Abuelo," she said.
He looked at her with polite interest. Then he looked past her, at the bare living room, at the rectangle of pale carpet, at the stacked boxes by the fireplace with their black-marker labels, KITCHEN, KITCHEN, LINENS, PHOTOS FRAGILE. His mouth opened and closed.
"Somebody took the couch," he said.
"It's okay. It's okay, it's me. It's Luz."
"Luz." He tried it the way you try a key in a lock. Then something turned, and his whole face softened. "Lucecita. Look how big. Where's your mother? Is your mother at school?"
Her mother had been in school twenty-five years ago.
"She's upstairs," Luz said. "She's right here."
Inez was on the stairs. She had come down slowly, holding the railing, the phone still in her hand, and she stopped three steps from the bottom so that she was taller than him, and Luz watched her mother's face go through something she had never seen it do. It was like watching someone try to put on four different expressions at once and none of them fit.
"Papi," she said.
He squinted up at her. He was a man who had always squinted at things he was about to fix.