He had married Leticia Cordero in a church in Haysville with fifty people present, three summers ago, after a year and a half of the kind of courtship that he would have told you, before it happened to him, did not happen to men in their forties with a child and a mortgage and a job that made them smell like roofing tar. She had cleaned his teeth. That was the joke they told at parties, that he had fallen in love with a woman who had spent the first forty minutes of their acquaintance with her hands in his mouth, telling him he needed to floss. It was a true joke. He had gone back for a six-month cleaning eight weeks early and lied to the receptionist about a sensitivity on the left side, and Leti had looked at his chart and looked at him and said, "There's nothing wrong with your left side, Mr. Vandermeer," and he had said, "No, I know," and she had laughed so hard she had to put down the scaler.
She had two daughters. She said so on the first date, before the food came, as if she were reading him the terms and conditions. Itzel was thirteen then and Amparo was four, and their father had not been part of their lives in any way that counted for four years, and she was not looking for a father for them, she said, and she was not looking to be anybody's mother but theirs. She had said that last part looking right at him. She knew about Bryony by then. Everybody at the practice knew about Bryony; he talked about her in the chair.
He had thought it was the most honest thing anyone had ever said to him on a date. He had thought, this woman is not going to surprise me.
The door from the house opened.
He saw the light from the kitchen first, a wedge of it falling across the concrete, and then a small shape in the middle of it, and the light went out again as the door was eased shut. He heard bare feet on the cold floor. Then the passenger door of the truck opened and Amparo climbed up into the seat beside him in her flannel pajamas with the foxes on them, pulling herself up by the handle on the ceiling the way she had seen her sister do, and shut the door behind her as quietly as she could, which was not very quietly.
"Ampi," he said. "It's almost eleven. What are you doing up?"