animals, and on her desk the iPad in its rubber purple case, charging. Down the hall, Bryony's door was closed. It was always closed now. He got up and went down there and stood outside it, and then he opened it, because it was the middle of the day and she was at school and he was her father.
Her room was the room she had always had. He had painted it lavender for her when she was four and she had let him paint it gray when she was twelve, and the gray had come out more blue than the chip, and she had said she liked it anyway. There was a music stand by the window with an open book of etudes on it. Her alto saxophone was at school; she kept it in a band locker and brought it home only on weekends. Over her bed she had taped a poster of a jazz club in New Orleans that his mother had brought back from a trip, and a printed photograph of the jazz band from last spring, twenty kids in black polo shirts squinting into the sun on the steps of the middle school. And on her desk, laid out in a neat row on a dish towel as if they were surgical instruments, were twenty-four Japanese brush markers in a clear plastic case.
He had noticed them a week ago. He had picked one up and asked where they came from, and Bryony had said, without looking at him, "Ampi gave them to me," and he had thought, that's nice, and put it down.
He picked one up now and turned it over. It was the kind with a flexible tip like a paintbrush. On the side of the plastic case, in the purple paint pen Amparo used for everything, someone had written AMPARO E. and then, under it, in different ink, a smaller word that had been scratched over with a fingernail until it was unreadable.
He put the marker back exactly where it had been, at the same angle as its neighbors. He closed the door. He went downstairs and put the statement back in his shirt pocket with his mother's folded page, so that they lay against each other, and then he sat at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood and waited for his family to come home.
He did not do it at dinner. He would remember that later as the one thing he got right that day.
Leti came home at five-forty with Amparo, whom she picked up from the after-school program at the rec center on her way, and Itzel came home at six-fifteen from practice smelling of the warehouse gym, and Bryony came down when she was called. They ate chicken