"I know."
"I'm just saying it so you know. I'm not, like, asking again." She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands. "It's fine. Half of second alto isn't going."
He did not know if that was true. He did not know who sat in second alto, or how many of them there were, or whether "fine" in the mouth of a thirteen-year-old girl ever meant fine. He said, "The roof's fourteen grand, kiddo. I'm sorry. If it were any other year," and she said, "I know, Dad, it's fine," and turned the radio up a little, which meant the conversation was over.
When they turned onto Larkspur Court, the porch light was on and Itzel's car was in the driveway, nosed up close to the garage door the way he had shown her so there would be room for his truck behind it. A silver Civic, a 2017, with a small dent in the rear passenger door that the seller had knocked two hundred dollars off for. In July, Leti had stood in this driveway with her keys in one hand and her other hand on her daughter's shoulder and said that Efraín had finally paid, after eight years, some of what he owed, and that she was going to put it straight into a car before he could change his mind and ask for it back. Barrett had believed her. He had walked around the car and kicked the tires, because that was what you did, and asked about the timing belt, and Itzel had laughed and hugged him and said, "It's a chain, Barrett, I already asked," and he had been so pleased that she had already asked.
He sat with the truck running after Bryony went inside. Through the front window he could see the kitchen, and Leti at the sink in the navy scrubs she wore on Mondays and had already set out for the morning, and Amparo standing on a chair beside her drying a mug that Barrett knew without seeing it was lumpy and glazed a shade of green no one had a name for, because Amparo had made it in the pottery class at the Arts Center and it was the only thing she would drink milk out of now.
The pottery class. He had not asked what it cost. He had not asked what anything cost since July, he realized, sitting there with the engine idling, because in July Leti had said Efraín paid, and after that every new thing that came into the house had seemed to arrive under that sentence like guests under one umbrella.