“This is actually yours?”
“Yes.”
“Hugo knows?”
“No.”
He shook his head.
“That makes it worse.”
“What does?”
“He treated you like that because he thought you didn’t have anything.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”
Teresa arrived later still wearing navy scrub pants beneath a cardigan.
“I can change.”
“Why?”
“I came from work.”
“You’re clean?”
She laughed.
“Yes.”
“Then sit down.”
Nobody at my house needed a costume to qualify as family.
Henry arrived with an old photograph of twenty-eight-year-old Armando sitting in a fishing boat.
“I’ve never seen this.”
“He hated that hat,” Henry said.
“He should have.”
We placed it beside the tree.
Soon more stories surfaced.
Mauricio admitted he stopped accepting invitations because of Carla.
Teresa said Carla once suggested she use the side entrance after work because she was “still in work clothes.”
Olivia remembered Carla moving her place card away from her parents because she wanted them closer to “the adults who had more in common.”
