"Then you know what I know." She pushed off the counter and pulled out the chair across from him and sat in it, and laid her hands flat on the table the way he had laid his, so that they looked for a moment like two people about to play a game neither of them knew the rules of. "I'm going to tell you some things that are true. It's not your money. It didn't come out of the roof, and it didn't come out of the house, and it didn't come out of any account with your name on it. It's not stolen. It's not a loan. Nobody is going to call this house asking for it back, and nobody is going to send you a bill. That's what I can tell you tonight."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"And Efraín? The car?"
She closed her eyes for a second. "I lied about Efraín. Efraín has not paid me a dollar since Amparo was a baby, and he never will, and I don't want anything from him. I said it because it was the easiest thing to say, and you believed it because it was the easiest thing to believe. I'm sorry about that. That's the part I'm sorriest about, if you want to know."
He did want to know. He found that he wanted to know so badly that it made his hands hurt. "Then where."
"Not tonight, Barrett."
"Are we in trouble?"
"No."
"Are you in trouble?"
Something moved at the corner of her mouth that was nearly a smile and was not. "Not the kind you mean."
He picked up his mother's list. He had not meant to; it was in his hand before he decided. "You spent twenty thousand dollars on your girls in six months," he said, and his voice was steady, which surprised him. "A car. A club team. A tutor. Photographs. Rings. A trampoline party for twenty kids. An iPad. And Bryony asked for one thing. Fourteen hundred dollars. For a band trip she's been talking about since the sixth grade. And you had three thousand dollars sitting in that account the whole time I was telling her no. You watched me tell her no. You sat at this table on a Sunday night in September and you watched me tell her the roof was more important."
Leti looked at him steadily. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Because she has a grandmother," Leti said, "who took her to Ireland for ten days in June."
"That's my mother."
"Yes. It is."
"That's different."
"Yes," Leti said. "It's different. You're right about that." She said it with no particular heat at all, the way you would agree with a man who told you it was cold outside, and he heard what was under it and did not want to hear it and pushed past it.