sat on the porch swing with the wet chains creaking and the smell of the neighbor's lilacs, and Winifred had held the envelope in her lap and talked for a while about nothing, about the weather and the new pastor, and then she had stopped talking about nothing.
"She said she'd been watching," Leti said. "For three years. She said she had been a principal for twenty-six years and she knew which families held and which ones didn't, she could tell by October of the first year, and ours wasn't going to hold. She said she'd watched you after Leigh left. She said you lost thirty pounds that year and she drove over every night with food and you didn't eat it, and she sat with Bryony on the bathroom floor while she cried for her mother, and she was not going to do that a second time. She said I'd told her myself. At our engagement dinner. Do you remember? She asked me why I'd waited so long to marry again, and I said something like, I like to know where the door is. I meant it as a joke. Sort of a joke." Leti looked at her own knees. "She remembered it. She said, You told me you always know where the door is, Leticia, and I believed you. I'm only holding it open."
"Jesus," Barrett said.
"And then she gave me the envelope. She said it was enough for first and last and a deposit and a car. She'd done the math. She said you wouldn't fight me. She said you'd be relieved, you just didn't know it yet, and Bryony would be better off with her house back the way it was, and nobody had to know where the money came from. She said she wasn't asking me to sign anything. She said she trusted me to be sensible." Leti laughed, a short small sound with no amusement in it. "That's the word she used. Sensible."
"And you took it."
"And I took it."
"Why?"
She looked at him then, straight, and he saw that she had been waiting three years for someone to ask her that question and had not expected it to be him.
"Because I've never in my life said no to a door," she said.
She told him about Efraín. Not all of it; he understood she would never tell him all of it, and that she had a right not to. She told him that when Itzel was nine and Amparo was in the hospital at six weeks old with