RSV, Efraín had cleaned out their joint account and changed the locks on the apartment in Garden Plain while she was sleeping in a chair in the pediatric unit, and that she had come home with an infant on a nebulizer and a nine-year-old holding her hand to find their clothes in trash bags on the landing and three hundred and forty dollars in her purse. She told him she had driven to her sister Araceli's house in Liberal that night, three hours in the dark, with the baby's breathing machine plugged into the cigarette lighter, and that the three of them had lived in Araceli's unfinished basement for four months on an air mattress with a slow leak, and that she had slept sitting up against the wall every night so she could hear the baby breathe. She told him she had promised herself in that basement that she would never again be anywhere she could not leave with her girls in an hour.
"There's a bag," she said. "In the back of the closet. Behind my winter boots. It has their birth certificates and their Social Security cards and their shot records, and Amparo's hospital bracelet, and three hundred and forty dollars in an envelope. I've moved it to every place I've lived for eight years. I moved it here. It's been behind my boots this whole time, Barrett. You've seen my boots."
He had seen her boots. He had thought the two hundred dollars in the toe was a quirk.
"So when your mother handed me an envelope with a door in it," Leti said, "I took the door. I didn't decide to. My hands decided. I put it in my pocket and I said thank you, Winifred, I'll think about it, and she patted my knee and went home. And on Saturday I drove the girls out to look at an apartment in Haysville, because I needed to know I could. I put down a nine-hundred-dollar holding deposit on a two-bedroom with a blue door. I had a week to sign."
"And you didn't."
"And I didn't."
He waited.
"Amparo asked if Bryony would have a room there too," Leti said. "In the car. On the way home. She said, Is the room with the fence going to be for me and Bryony, because Bryony doesn't like to sleep with the hall light on and I do, so we'll have to figure it out. And I had to pull over on Meridian. I sat in a Kum and Go parking lot for twenty minutes. Itzel bought her a slushie." She was not crying. He did not think he had ever seen