"I know, Grandpa," I said. "I know. They got them out. The firemen got them out."
"Bueno," he said. And then, after a while, "Bueno, bueno, bueno," and he patted my hand on his belt with his good hand, and started to sing again, under his breath, and Bert got up off the couch and went into the kitchen and stood with his back to us and blew his nose for a long time.
Captain Ulibarri came back from the hospital at a quarter to seven, in a city car somebody had driven him home in. I had gotten my grandfather into the recliner and given him his supper, cut up small, and he had eaten all of it, and Bert had stayed. The captain came to our back door, not the station, and knocked, though it was open, and came into the kitchen with his helmet under his arm and sat down across from me at the table where I did my homework, and he looked a hundred years old.
The mother's name was Corrine Esquibel, he said. The little girl was Inés. She was three. They'd come up from Odessa, Texas, in January, where the husband had been laid off from a drilling outfit, and he'd gone on to look for work in New Mexico and sent them on ahead to stay with Corrine's aunt in Pueblo, but the aunt had died at Christmas and nobody had told them, and when they got here the aunt's house had been sold, so Corrine had rented the Gurulé place with what money they had. She hadn't paid the gas. The gas company had sent a notice, and then another one, and then they'd shut off the furnace and left the meter on so she could cook, and she'd been heating the house with the oven, with the door open and towels under the doors to keep the heat in, for ten days. She'd had a headache for a week. She thought it was worry. The doctors at Parkview thought she'd been lying on that kitchen floor since about noon.
"The little girl's going to be all right," the captain said. "They think so. She's young and she was in the back bedroom with the door half shut and she was the last one down. She's at Parkview tonight. They have her on oxygen. She's eating Jell-O, red, she wanted the red. She asked for her dog." He rubbed his eyes. "The mother they flew to Denver an hour ago. To the chamber. They put you in a tank and push the oxygen into you under pressure. They don't know yet. It was a long time. They don't know, Eloy, I won't tell you they do. But she was breathing on her own when they put her on the helicopter."
"Is the dog okay?"
"Mrs. Quintana took the dog. It's in a box by her heater eating hamburger."