She got out and shut the door and walked to her car and drove home ahead of him with her turn signal on at every corner.
Bryony was in her room when he got there. He knocked, which he had started doing when she turned eleven, and she said come in in the voice that meant she would rather he didn't, and he went in and sat on the floor with his back against her bed, because he had learned at some point that she would talk to him if he was lower than she was and would not if he stood in the door. She was at her desk. The brush markers were still lined up on their dish towel. She was drawing on a page of staff paper: not notes, he saw, but the little shapes of the notes turned into creatures, an eighth note with a face and legs walking across a measure, a whole rest wearing a hat.
"Itzel says you have the worst reed habit in the state of Kansas," he said.
"Itzel can mind her own business." Bryony did not look up. "She plays Taylor Swift so loud. At six in the morning."
"Does she talk to you?"
"Not really. Sometimes. She asked me once what a key signature was." The marker moved. "I explained it. She said it sounded like volleyball rotations."
"Is it?"
"No. Kind of." She capped the marker and set it down at the end of the row, square. "Is Gran in trouble?"
He had not expected that. He looked up at her. "What makes you ask?"
"You were weird at dinner. And Leti made eggs. And Ampi was crying in the bathroom this morning and when I asked her what was wrong she said she was just tired, which is a lie, Ampi's never tired." Bryony turned her chair around to face him. Her face was very still, and very like her mother's when her mother was bracing for something, and he had not thought about Leigh's face in a long time. "And Gran's been saying stuff."
"What stuff?"
Bryony pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "Like, when it's just us again. Like that. She says it like a joke. When it's just us again, we'll do the tree at your house the old way. When it's just us again you can have your room back the way it was. She asked me in the summer what color I'd want my room if I could pick, and I said it's already the color I want, and she said, no, I mean when Amparo's not next door with the hall light. She said Ampi's name." Bryony looked down at her own covered hands. "I thought she meant when Itzel goes to college. And Ampi has to share with somebody. I don't know what I thought."