She had been on the overnight. Luz had been home with him, as Luz had been home with him most nights that summer, and Kiara had been sleeping over, and the girls had been in the lavender room with their headsets on, playing whatever it was they played, something with dragons and a lot of shouting. At some point after one in the morning, Aurelio Montoya had put on his good shoes and his Sunday jacket and let himself out the front door and walked four and a half miles down Lomas Boulevard toward a shop he had closed seven years ago. A cab driver found him at the corner of Lomas and San Mateo at 2:40, standing in front of a mattress store where the shop used to be, holding his keys out at a door that wasn't his, crying because they wouldn't work.
The cab driver called the police. The police called Inez at work. She drove home with her hazards on, and when she ran into the house at 3:15 the girls were still upstairs, still in their headsets, and Luz had looked up at her mother in the doorway and said, cheerfully, Hey, you're early, and then had seen her face.
Inez had not yelled. She remembered that with a kind of horror, that she had not yelled. She had only said, Where is your grandfather, very quietly, and watched her daughter understand, and that had been worse than any yelling could have been, for both of them.
He was in Briarwood eleven days later. The house went on the market three weeks after that.
She had not talked to Luz about that night. Not once. Every time she began to, she would see Luz's face in the doorway, and she would feel something come up in her so hot and so tangled that she could not tell which part was anger at her daughter and which part was something far worse aimed at herself, and so she would go and pack a box instead. Boxes were simple. Boxes had a top and a bottom.
Now her father sat in a child's gaming chair in her empty hallway and asked her where his things were, and she looked at him, and looked at her daughter standing beside him with her face swollen from crying, and looked at Kiara, who had been there that night too, and who was standing very still at the bottom of the stairs with her hand on the railing, and Inez found that she had run all the way to the end of the schedule. There was nothing written after this. There was no box for this.
"Papi," she said, and stopped.
Aurelio looked around the hallway again, slowly. At the pale carpet. At the boxes marked KITCHEN. At the truck through the open door, its back rolled up, the mustard recliner visible behind the refrigerator like someone peeking from behind a curtain. He looked for a long time. And then something happened in his face that Inez had not seen in months, not since the summer: the fog didn't clear exactly, but it thinned, like early morning on the river when you can suddenly see the far bank.
"Ah," he said softly. "You sold it."
Nobody said anything.
"You sold the house." He nodded, slowly, to himself. He didn't sound angry. He sounded like a man reading a measurement off a tape. "That's — okay. That's right. I told you to. Didn't I tell you to? At Arellano's."
"You did," Inez said. Her voice broke on the second word. "You did, Papi."