himself on both of theirs, second, under their mother, and he put Leti on Bryony's, second, under him, and he moved his mother to third, and he sat for a while looking at the screen and thought that it was a small thing and that the small things were the ones he had never once counted.
On Sunday night, Leti opened the back of their closet. She moved her winter boots aside, and there was the bag: a navy duffel no bigger than a gym bag, its zipper pull replaced with a twist tie. She did not open it. She held it a moment, the way you hold something that has been heavy for a long time and has become, without your noticing, light. Then she carried it downstairs and put it on the shelf of the hall closet by the front door, beside the accordion folder, where anyone opening the closet for a coat would see it.
"I'm not unpacking it," she said. "I don't know if I can. I don't think I'm supposed to. But it's not hidden anymore. That's the best I've got right now."
"That's enough," he said, and did not know if it was, and thought that she did not either, and that this was the first honest thing either of them had said about it.
His mother had not called. Thanksgiving was five weeks off. He had texted her on Friday, two o'clock, three girls and two adults and you, and the message said Delivered under it and nothing else, and he did not text again.
On Tuesday at ten past six he was on the front step in his coat with a cup of coffee, and Leti was beside him in her robe with her arms crossed against the cold, and the sky over the development was the color of a bruise just starting to heal, purple going yellow at the east edge. The Civic's lights came on in the driveway. Itzel had the radio up already, and it was Taylor Swift, and through the passenger window Barrett could see Bryony with a reed in her mouth, rolling her eyes. The saxophone case was in the back seat. Amparo was at the upstairs window in her fox pajamas with her hand flat on the glass.
The car backed down the driveway. It checked both ways twice. At the end of Larkspur Court its turn signal came on for no one.
"Is Gran Win coming?" Amparo called down from the window, which she was not supposed to open, and had.
"I don't know yet," Barrett called back. "I'm setting her a place."
Leti leaned into him the half inch she always did. He stood there in the cold beside his wife, not counting anything, and watched the street until the girls were gone.