"Pilar," he said, gently, uncertain, and then, "No. No, you're — Inez. You cut your hair."
She hadn't. It was pulled back. He had last seen it down.
"How did you get here?" Inez said. Her voice was very calm, the calm Luz recognized from when she'd broken her wrist in fifth grade, a calm that was a lid on a pot. "Papi. How did you get here?"
"The bus." He held up the pharmacy bag as if it explained everything. "The sixty-six to Central and then the — the other one. The one that goes by the Frontier. I had my card." He patted his windbreaker pocket and his face clouded for a second, because the card wasn't there, or maybe it was and he didn't know what it was. "I went for my pills. They didn't have my pills. The girl there didn't know me."
The bag, Luz could see now, was empty. Folded over at the top, the way he'd always folded paper bags to reuse them, and empty.
Inez came down the last three steps. She didn't hug him. Luz noticed that, and then hated herself for noticing, and then noticed that her mother's hand, as it went out to take the empty bag from him, was shaking hard enough to rattle the paper.
"Okay," Inez said. "Okay. Let me take that. Sit down, Papi. Luz, is there — "
There was nowhere to sit. The couch was on the truck. The kitchen chairs were on the truck. The recliner Abuelo had re-covered three times, most recently in a mustard corduroy he called distinguished and Kiara called a crime, was on the truck, wedged behind the refrigerator.
"I'll get a chair," Kiara said from the top of the stairs. Nobody had heard her come down to the landing. She turned and ran back into Luz's room, and they heard her wrestling with something, swearing under her breath, and then she came out bumping one of the gaming chairs down the staircase step by step, the wheels clattering, the blue stripe flashing. She rolled it across the hallway floor and stopped it behind Aurelio's knees like a valet.
"Mr. Montoya," she said. "You fixed this. You want to try it out?"
He turned around and looked at the chair, and his face cleared again in that frightening, wonderful way, like a window someone had wiped.
"I did this seam," he said. He ran his thumb along the edge of the seat where the old vinyl met the new. "You can't see it. You see it?"