her cry. "And then that Wednesday you took Itzel out to the Towne East parking lot after dinner to teach her to parallel park in your truck, because she'd failed it twice at the DMV and she was humiliated, and you put out the orange cones from the garage and you sat in the passenger seat for two hours and you didn't yell once. She came home and told me you said she had better instincts than you did. She was so proud she couldn't eat." Leti shook her head slowly. "I let the deposit go. I called the lady and said we weren't coming, and she said she'd keep the nine hundred, and I said I know."
"Then why didn't you give the money back?"
It was a fair question and she treated it like one. She was quiet for a long time.
"I meant to," she said. "I wrote her a note to go with it. I still have the note. And then I didn't mail it, and then it was June, and your mother took Bryony to Ireland for ten days. Do you remember what she brought my girls from Ireland?"
He did not.
"Two keychains," Leti said. "Little pewter ones. A harp and a sheep. From the airport. They still had the airport stickers on the back." She said it without bitterness, almost gently, as if she were describing a bruise on someone else's roof. "And Itzel told me she was going to take the closing shift at the Dillons on Kellogg, eleven to seven, because she needed to save for a car, and she was going to walk home along the frontage road at seven in the morning because I'm at work by then. Along Kellogg. And I thought about the money sitting in that account. And I thought, your mother bought this. She bought it to get rid of us. So I'll get rid of it on us. I'll spend it on exactly what she paid to make go away." Leti let out a breath. "That's what I told myself. That it was a correction. That I was just putting things even. Three Christmases of gift cards, Barrett. Twenty-five dollars each in an envelope, and Bryony gets a laptop. Thanksgiving with place cards in her handwriting that said Barrett and Bryony and Leticia, and then for my girls, a little card at the end of the table that said Children. You never saw it. You never once saw it, and I never said, because what was I going to say? That your mother writes nicer place cards for your kid than for mine? I'd sound like a crazy woman. She'd make sure I sounded like a crazy woman. She was very good at it. She was a principal."