"She's thirteen. She's not the one who took herself to Ireland. She doesn't know what anything costs. She just knows her stepsister has a car and her other stepsister has an iPad and she has a line through November first on the fridge, and I didn't put that line there and neither did you. She put it there herself. She crossed herself off." He heard his voice getting away from him and could not seem to catch it. "I have paid for your girls' groceries for three years, Leti. I have paid for their shoes. I never once said a word. I never once asked you what you were putting where. And you had money, you had twenty thousand dollars of money from God knows where, and you couldn't find fourteen hundred of it for my kid."
The words your girls and my kid stayed in the kitchen after he said them, like a smell.
Leti did not flinch. She looked down at her own hands on the table, and then she said, very quietly, "That's fair. The band trip. That one's fair. I'm not going to argue with you about that one."
"Then explain it to me."
"I can't explain it without telling you the rest. And I'm not going to tell you the rest tonight, because you're not going to hear it tonight, and because when I tell you, there's no taking it back. For you, I mean. Not for me." She stood up. She pushed the chair back under the table, square with the edge. "I'm going to bed. You can come up or not. I won't lock anything."
She went. He heard her on the stairs, and he heard their bedroom door, and he did not hear it close.
He sat a while longer. He folded the two pieces of paper together and put them back in his pocket. Somewhere above him a floorboard creaked, in the hall, the one outside the bathroom that had creaked since the house was built, and he looked up at the ceiling as if he could see through it. Then he turned off the kitchen light and went out the door to the garage and got into his truck and sat in the driver's seat in the dark with the door closed, because it was the only room in the house that was entirely his, and because he did not think he could lie down beside her and face the wall she faced.
The garage smelled of cold concrete and fertilizer and the rubber of Amparo's bicycle tires. The new bicycle. It hung from a hook on the wall in front of him, a purple one with white streamers on the handlebars, and he looked at it through the windshield for a long time.