I dropped the last few feet to the dirt, grabbed my shirt off the sawhorse where I'd tossed it an hour ago, and wiped the sawdust off my arms. The shirt was a lost cause, sweat-soaked and smeared with wood stain, but Mila had stopped noticing what I looked like at pickup around month two.
The truck started on the second try, which was better than yesterday. The Reyes Appliance Repair logo on the door had faded from years of sun and mountain roads, but Mamá refused to let me repaint it.Your father's name stays on. End of discussion.So the truck rattled down the mountain with a dead man's name on its side, past appliance vans driven by Kalderash men hauling cargo that never appeared on any invoice. My father had run the same game. The best cover was a real business doing real work.
The academy sat at the edge of town, tucked behind a stone wall covered in bougainvillea. The building had been a monastery once, and every century since had left a mark on the stone without agreeing on a style. Now it housed thirty kids, an arts program, and my daughter, who sat on the front steps with her backpack between her knees and a sketchbook open on her lap.
I pulled in. She moved her pencil in quick strokes, shading something I couldn't make out from the truck. I honked once. She held up one finger without raising her head.
I grinned and waited. A year ago, Mila would have been on her feet the second she clocked the engine sound. She would have scanned the vehicle, checked the exits, gone still until she confirmed it was me. Now she made me wait because she had a drawing to finish.
She closed the sketchbook, shoved it in her bag, and jogged to the truck. She climbed in, tossed the backpack on the floor, and buckled her seatbelt.
"Hey, cariño. Good day?"
"Señora Vega says I have to stop drawing during math."
"She's probably right."
"My math is fine. I tested out of the next unit already." She pulled the sketchbook back out and flipped it open. "Look."
I glanced over while I turned the truck around. She'd drawn the monastery courtyard, the one with the fountain and the orange trees. She'd captured the way the afternoon light came through the archway, the shadows on the flagstones, even the crack in the fountain's basin that the school kept meaning to fix. She was ten, and she drew like someone who'd spent a lifetime learning to see the world in terms of angles and sightlines and then turned that training into something beautiful.
"That's incredible, corazón."
"I want to do it in charcoal next. Can you get me the vine kind? Not compressed. Vine."
"Write it down for me, and I'll order it tonight."
She wrote it down. She wrote everything down now: lists and notes and labels on her drawings, filling notebooks the way other kids filled journals.
We drove home with the windows down and the warm air pushing through the cab. The road wound up through olive groves and sheep pasture, past the old Reyes place. Mila sketched in the passenger seat, bracing the book against her knee on the curves. I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the open window frame.
Home was a stone house at the top of the valley, set back from the road behind a low wall covered in climbing roses that Mamá had planted the week we moved in. The tile roof had gone the color of dried clay, and the front door was heavy enough that Mila had to lean her whole weight into it for the first three months. Every time I pulled into the gravel drive, it caught me in the chest.
We'd built this. Jasper and me. Diego's stupidly optimistic promise on a rooftop in Morocco turned into stone and mortar and a garden where Carmen Reyes grew peppers so hot they made grown men cry.
Mamá had designed the kitchen herself, dragging Jasper through tile showrooms and appliance stores until he'd started making spreadsheets to track her choices, which she loved because it proved he took it seriously. Today the whole ground floor smelled like saffron and my stomach growled from the doorway.
"Mija!" Carmen turned from the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. She pulled Mila into a hug and kissed the top of her head. "How was school?"
"Good. I drew the courtyard. Where's Jasper?"
"In his cave." Mamá waved toward the back of the house. "Tell him dinner is in an hour, and if he misses it again, I'm feeding his portion to the dog."
"We don't have a dog," Mila said.
"I'll get one just to make the point."
Mila dropped her backpack by the door and disappeared down the hall. I stole an olive from the cutting board, and Mamá swatted my hand without looking.
"How's the school?" she asked.
"Framing's almost done. Another few weeks on the roof."
"You eat today?"
"Mamá."
"That's not an answer."
