running beside her down Larkspur Court until his knees ached, and he had not known that she had been carrying his mother's sentence around for six months like a stone in her shoe. Bryony will be better off. He thought about her giving away her markers one at a time. He thought about her putting her good socks in someone else's laundry and not saying so.
Their bedroom door was open, the way Leti had said it would be. The lamp on her side was on. She was sitting up against the headboard in her robe with her knees drawn up, not reading, not doing anything, and she looked at him when he came in, and she looked at his face, and she knew. He saw her know.
"Amparo," she said.
"She was under the porch. With the Mendenhalls' cat."
Leti closed her eyes. She did not open them for a while. "Of course she was," she said at last. "Of course she was. She's been asking me since May whether we're staying for Christmas. I thought it was because of her father. Efraín used to promise Christmas and then not come." She opened her eyes. "What did she hear?"
He told her. He did not soften it, because he did not know how, and because the words were not his to soften. He watched each sentence land on her.
When he finished, she said, "Yes. That's what Winifred said. That's almost exactly what she said." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and then took them away. "She left out the part where your mother told me she'd seen my kind before. She said it nicely. She was always nice to me. You've seen it. She has never once in three years been rude to me in front of you."
He sat down on the end of the bed. Not close. "Tell me."
"You want the rest now."
"I want the rest now."
She told him.
It had been the Monday after Easter. He had been in Hutchinson for three days on a commercial claim, a grain cooperative's warehouse with the roof peeled back like a sardine can. The girls had been at school. Leti had a day off because the practice was closed for new carpet, and she had been in the kitchen in a sweatshirt with her hair up, wiping down the cabinets, when the doorbell rang, and it was his mother, in her raincoat, with her purse on her arm and a white envelope in her hand. Winifred had never come over without calling first. Leti had thought someone had died. She had actually said that, at the door: is it Barrett? And his mother had said, no, dear, Barrett's fine, could we sit outside, it's stopped raining, and they had