Here is what Inez had practiced.
Papi, the house is being sold so you can stay somewhere safe. You signed the papers with me two years ago, when you were well, at Mr. Arellano's office, do you remember? You said, "When it's time, don't be sentimental, mija. A house is wood." You said it, Papi. I wrote it down.
That was true. All of it was true. He had said it, in the lawyer's office on Fourth Street with the bad air conditioning, the day he'd signed the power of attorney, and he had laughed when he said it, and he'd tapped the table twice with his finger, the way he did when a job was finished. She had written it on the back of an envelope in the car afterward, because even then, even two years ago, she had known she would need proof, someday, that this was not her idea.
What she had not practiced was what to do with the other thing he'd said, years before that, at her mother's funeral, standing at the stove in this kitchen at two in the morning heating up a pot of somebody's posole that neither of them could eat. He had said: Promise me you won't put me in one of those places. And she had said, because she was thirty-one and her mother was dead and she would have promised him the moon, Never, Papi. Never.
You could not be held to a promise like that. Everybody said so, including the support group in the basement of the Methodist church on Lomas, eleven people in folding chairs with their own versions of the same promise in their faces. She had believed them in the basement. She did not believe them now, with him looking at her from Kiara's chair.
The diagnosis had come eighteen months ago, though the forgetting had started before that, how long before was the thing she could not stop doing math about. Alzheimer's, early onset of the later stages, the neurologist said, which was a sentence that made no sense and made perfect sense. At first it was small things. Keys. Names. He called the neighbor's dog by the name of a dog that had died in 1994. He left the burner on under an empty kettle and the kettle went black, and Luz scrubbed it and told Inez she'd burned it herself making ramen, and Inez believed her, because she wanted to, because she was working doubles at the pharmacy on Juan Tabo and coming home at midnight and falling asleep in her scrubs.
That was the thing. That was the thing she would not say out loud. She had wanted to believe Luz.
The money had made the decision for them. The upholstery shop on Lomas had made a living and not much more; he had closed it at seventy-two with a pension that wouldn't cover a car payment and a savings account he was proud of and that Briarwood House would eat in nine months. Seven thousand eight hundred dollars a month, for a locked memory-care wing with a garden and a piano and an aide named Dawn who called him Mr. Aurelio and knew to put the radio on the Spanish station at four. There was a waiting list for the Medicaid beds. To get on it, he had to spend down. To spend down, he had to sell the only thing he owned, which was this house, which he had bought in 1979 for forty-one thousand dollars, which had his wife's handwriting still on the inside of the pantry door where she had kept a running tally of who owed who tamales.
So Inez had sold it. She had listed it at the start of summer and accepted the first decent offer, from a quiet man named Stanislaw Bek who was moving down from Colorado Springs to be near his daughter, and who had asked, standing in the backyard under the apricot tree, whether the tree came with the house or whether the family wanted to take a cutting, and she had not been able to answer him, and had gone and sat in her car for twenty minutes.
She had signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment on Montgomery, nine minutes from Briarwood, eleven from the pharmacy, and in a different school district, which meant that Luz, who had been at Cleveland Middle since sixth grade, would be starting eighth at a school where she knew nobody. Luz had found that out from the lease, which Inez had left on the counter, and not from Inez.
She had meant to tell her. In July she had written it at the top of the whiteboard: TALK TO LUZ. Then she had erased it to make room for UTILITIES TRANSFER.
And under all of it there was the night in August.