She did not answer right away. She was holding a flashlight, the small blue one from the kitchen drawer, and she had not turned it on. She sat with her feet straight out in front of her because they did not reach the floor of the cab, and her hair was in the two braids her mother did for her at night so it would not tangle, and she looked through the windshield at her own bicycle on the wall.
"I heard you," she said. "On the stairs. I was going to the bathroom."
"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn't have been loud."
"You weren't very loud. You were a little loud." She turned the flashlight over in her hands. "Are you mad at Mom about the money?"
He did not know how to answer that. He tried to think of what Leti would want him to say, and could not, and so he said, "I'm confused about the money. Grownups get mad when they're confused. It's not a good habit."
She nodded as if this were reasonable. Then she leaned toward him across the console, so close that he could smell the strawberry toothpaste she used, and she put one small hand up beside her mouth as if there were someone else in the truck who might hear, and she whispered.
"She's been hiding something even worse from you."
He went still. "What, honey?"
"I'm not supposed to know. She doesn't know I know." Amparo's whisper was very small and very serious, the whisper of a child who has rehearsed something in the dark. "It's about Grandma Win."
He did not understand. For a moment the words did not attach to anything. "Grandma Win?"
"In April. When it was raining and then it stopped. I was under the porch with Pancho." Pancho was the Mendenhall family's orange cat from two doors down, who considered the space under their front porch his summer residence and whom Amparo was strictly forbidden to crawl under the porch to visit. "Grandma Win came to the door and Mom came out and they sat on the swing. And Grandma Win had an envelope. And she said," and here Amparo stopped, and he watched her gather it up, every word, from wherever she had been keeping it for six months, "she said, This is so you can go, Leticia. It's enough for first and last and a deposit and a car. He won't fight you. He'll be relieved. And Bryony will be better off."
The garage was very quiet. The furnace in the utility closet clicked on, and its low breath came through the wall.
"And Mom took it," Amparo whispered. "She didn't say anything. She just took it. And then on Saturday she drove me and Itzel to see a place with a blue door, by the Walmart in Haysville, and the lady showed us a room that was going