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  She looked at him quizzically.

  “My real name is Andrés Soto, but some people call me Andy.”

  She noticed he didn’t say that people called him Andy. He said that some people called him Andy. Was she being singled out? She tried the name to see how it sounded. “Andy.” She blushed. She was not used to blushing.

  “What?”

  “It feels strange to call you that.”

  “I know, I know. It’s this.” He touched the white collar around his neck. “I can take it off if it’ll make you more comfortable.”

  “That’s all right,” she said quickly.

  “Okay, I’ll leave it on. But please call me Andy.”

  She was aware that he was looking at her with the same intensity she had felt when she shook his hand in the greeting line. He seemed to be probing inside of her, looking for an answer to a question. Did he look at everyone that way, or was it just her? “I wanted to talk to you,” she said softly, her eyes lowered. She caught herself immediately and raised her eyes to meet his. “About the time that the church is giving us to move out of the parsonage.”

  “Ahh. I see the deacons paid their visit. I wasn’t expecting them to talk to you until later this week. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  So he was the one pushing this. “That’s why you wanted to come on Wednesday? You wanted to give us the good news yourself.” It felt good to be sarcastic.

  “I thought I could probably put the request in a, how shall I say it, a more spiritual context.”

  Kate didn’t mean to laugh. It was a short little laugh that almost sounded like a snort. When she was a believer, “spiritual” to her meant believing in things that couldn’t be seen. But booting them out was something you could see and hear and feel and touch. There was nothing spiritual about that.

  “Surely you knew it would happen, sooner or later,” he said quietly, gently, as if he was trying to console her.

  “Not that soon.” She expected to see some recognition of how ridiculous that deadline was, but his face was blank. “We’ll be barely out of school.”

  He shifted in his chair. “The church plans to do everything it can to help you.”

  “Help us do what?”

  He didn’t answer, perhaps because the answer was too obvious. The church was going to do everything it could to get rid of them by June first. She remembered suddenly that the deadline for responding to Stanford was May first. She felt her stomach turn. She was being eaten away by deadlines.

  “Will you let me tell you something?” He moved his chair closer to her, their knees almost touching. She pulled in her legs. “It’s what I wanted to tell you before the deacons came to see you, before you formed an idea of me as some kind of monster. But they beat me to it, and now you probably think I’m unfeeling.”

  “This is the spiritual part.” Kate grinned bitterly.

  “Believe it or not, it is. There are good reasons for having you move by that deadline, which I know is short. Yes, they are spiritual reasons.” She had noticed before the spark in his eyes, a spark he could dim or brighten at will. Now the spark was dimmed, the voice shifted down into an intimate tone. “I confess that when I saw you in church this morning, and as I talk to you face-to-face, talking about the deadline is harder than I imagined.”

  He leaned back in the chair and made himself comfortable, as if he were preparing to tell a story. “A couple of years ago, my abuelita fell and broke her hip. She was eighty-five and lived by herself. She lived in the same home she’d lived in all her life and never wanted to move anyplace else. My mother and the grandchildren paid for someone to come in every day to take care of her. We knew that even with this arrangement, she was too old to live in her house by herself, but we didn’t want to accept the fact that she needed to be placed in a nursing home. Probably we also felt guilty that neither Mom nor the grandchildren wanted to take her into their homes. Among other things, Abuelita was a very difficult woman to get along with. She really was not the sweet Mexican grandmother we all imagine when we hear the word abuelita.

  “Anyway, when she broke her hip and she was in the hospital, there was this Indian doctor who was treating her. They had put restraints on Abuelita because she wanted to yank her IV out and go back home. So this doctor, he took me aside and very harshly asked me what our plans for her were. ‘What arrangements have you made for her?’ he said. At first I thought he was talking about the arrangements we’d made in case she died, but then I realized he was talking about Abuelita’s future living situation. I stuttered something about how we hadn’t made any arrangements yet. So he yelled at me, ‘She’s out of here in two days. You need to have arrangements made by then.’ Then he walked off, leaving me stunned there in the hallway.”

  Kate narrowed her eyes. What did this story have to do with her?

  He went on. “What that doctor did was hit us, all my family, with the truth, with the fact that something needed to be done about Abuelita. We had to admit that none of us were capable of taking her into our homes. And even harder, we were forced to admit that we didn’t want her in our homes.” He paused. He seemed to be expecting a lightbulb to click on in her head. “The point is,” he continued, teacherlike, “the doctor gave us a deadline that was way too short, but it was that ridiculous deadline that made us decide to place Abuelita in a nursing home. Without the shock of that deadline, it would have taken us a long time to come to that realization because of how guilty we all felt about it. And more significantly, we would probably never have been honest with ourselves. Do you see?”

  “Actually, I don’t,” Kate said. “We know we have to leave the parsonage. We expected it. It’s not like we have to be ‘shocked’ into admitting it.” She made quotation marks in the air.

  He smiled, then his countenance went serious. “I wasn’t really referring to your decision to move. There are other decisions you need to make.”

  Did he somehow know about Stanford? Was he telling her to have Mary and her mother settled before she left in September? “Like what kind of decisions?” she asked.

  “You need to do something about your mother.”

  “Excuse me?” For an instant she thought she imagined what he said and hadn’t actually heard it.

  “You need to make some decisions about your mother. There are things you need to accept about her, just like there were things we had to accept about Abuelita. I know you may not like me for it, but I’m doing you and your sister a favor, just like that Indian doctor did for my family.”

  “Thanks a big bunch,” she said. It was a childish thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else. She blinked a few times. The anger she felt at that moment was keeping her from seeing straight. She shook her head, almost amused.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing, Andy.”

  “You don’t think I’m old enough to counsel you on this?”

  “Counsel?”

  “Yes, counsel. Give you advice about what is best for you.”

  It was too bad that Mary wasn’t here. As bad as Kate imagined the meeting with Mr. Lucas and Mr. Acevedo to have been, there was no way it was as terrible as this “counseling” session was turning out to be. “What do you know about my mother?” she demanded.

  “I know,” he said, as if he really did know everything there was to know. He took a deep breath and then spoke with an authority and gravity Kate had not heard in him before. “I know she’s no longer alive. Not in a way that we determine human life. She’s a body that breathes.”

  Kate caught her breath. She had been ready to yell at him, to shout about his ignorance and injustice, but what would she yell? He was telling the truth. Someone had finally said, “She’s not alive.” She was used to telling Mary that Mother was not conscious, but she had never said that she was not alive, and now she realized that those were the words she had wanted to say all along.

  “What kind of decisions?” She was breathing heavily, but she was calm.
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  “Pardon?”

  “You said there were decisions that I needed to make. That we needed to make. Mary and me. Before June first.” There was a quiet anger in her voice.

  “You need to consider all your options,” he said.

  “What kind of options?”

  “Options,” he repeated. “Options that you need to consider, pray about, ask the Lord for discernment.”

  She searched through her mind for any options with respect to Mother that she had missed, that she hadn’t thought about since Father died. The only option that came to mind was finding someone to help Mary. Maybe he was referring to putting Mother in a hospital of some sort, but that was so expensive it was unfeasible. She shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t understand what he was driving at.

  “There are options with respect to your mother, for someone in her condition, that are moral and legal, that may be what are best for you and your sister and even for your mother herself.”

  She felt a burning blast explode in her head as the significance of his words dawned on her. “No,” she gasped. She almost jumped out of the chair. The room, the man in front of her, they were all asphyxiating her. “I have to go now.” She tried to step over his leg but he stood up and took her arm.

  “Wait, Kate, please.”

  “You’ll have your house whenever.” She had forgotten the exact date.

  “I know that sounded harsh, even shocking. But I meant what I said this morning at the pulpit. The truth sometimes hurts. What I’m asking is for you to face the truth. The truth will set you free. You need to be free to grow, to express God’s love inside you. You need to make a decision based on the truth, on love, on what is best for you and your sister, not on guilt or cheap sentimentality. Love has to do with growth and life and it requires courageous decisions.”

  He was still holding on to her. She did not try to move away. “I have to go now.”

  “Don’t shut me out. Let’s talk. Promise me we will continue to talk. You can call me day or night.”

  “Counseling?”

  “No, not counseling.”

  “What will it be, then?”

  “Two people searching for the truth together.”

  She shook her arm loose and went out the door.

  Mary saw the letter as soon as she opened the door. Aunt Julia had placed it right in the middle of the coffee table, leaning on the plastic flower arrangement, so that Mary or Kate, whoever came home from school first, would see it.

  “It’s from the insurance company,” Aunt Julia said.

  “Oh.” Mary didn’t mean to sound uninterested, but she had forgotten that they were waiting for it. She dropped her backpack on the floor and started to walk toward her mother’s bedroom.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Aunt Julia asked.

  “I’m going to check on Mama,” Mary said. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she knew that Aunt Julia never looked in on Mama. Every day when she came home, Mary had to change Mama’s diaper as soon as she arrived.

  When she returned to the living room, Aunt Julia was holding the letter up to the light streaming in from the window. “I’m trying to see if there’s a check in there,” she explained.

  “Do you see one?”

  “I can’t tell, but it feels heavy. Here, open it.” She thrust the envelope at Mary. Mary weighed the envelope in her palm before quickly placing it on the coffee table.

  “What is it?” Aunt Julia sounded worried.

  “Nothing. I think we should let Kate open it.”

  “Nonsense. You can open it as well. You’re part of this household.”

  Mary shook her head. “We need to wait until Kate gets here. It’s addressed to her. Also, she’d be disappointed if we opened it without her.” Mary made it sound as if she didn’t want to take the joy of opening it from Kate, but inside she was afraid of what the letter might say.

  Aunt Julia dropped herself on the sofa. “I will never in a million years understand how you girls think. That man sure did a number on you.” Mary could tell she was about to start on Papa. “Oh, relax,” Aunt Julia said, pointing for her to sit down in the armchair. “I’ll keep quiet. I know you don’t like me to criticize your father. I sit here all day long without anyone to talk to except the TV and that Talita woman, who’s as quiet as a rock, and you can’t keep me company for a few minutes? What I’d really like to do is give a piece of my mind to those people at your church, telling you to get out in two months and then wiping their consciences with some measly dollars.”

  “We can find someplace else to live,” Mary said weakly. She didn’t want to defend them. She just didn’t want to hear any more of Aunt Julia’s raving.

  “Don’t get me started,” Aunt Julia huffed. “My blood pressure shoots up just thinking about how they’re treating you.”

  Mary sat down. She wanted to change her clothes and go out to the backyard to try her hand at painting once again, but she felt sorry for Aunt Julia. She knew it was hard for her to be quiet most of the day. Talking was her favorite kind of entertainment, and even when Kate and Mary were home, there wasn’t a lot of conversing going on. Mary wasn’t much of a talker, and Kate . . .

  Something had been happening to Kate ever since Simon sort of proposed to her. She was happy when she got the letter from Stanford, but then she had been sulkier and more irritable than ever after talking to Reverend Soto three days before. It was as if a cloud of gunpowder hovered over her, ready to ignite. When Mary asked about her conversation with the minister, she mumbled something about how it made sense for them to move out of the parsonage as soon as possible anyway. Mary hoped that the insurance letter brought good news. Maybe then the dark mood that enveloped Kate would disappear for good.

  Aunt Julia and Mary sat looking at each other. She was probably waiting for Mary to speak first. She had told Mary on numerous occasions that she hated to be the one who always asked the questions. “Well,” Aunt Julia said at last, “what are you thinking of doing with the money?” She glanced at the envelope. “I guess the first thing you have to do is deposit the check. You should put a little in that credit union account of your father’s and then you should invest the rest in some CDs.” Aunt Julia must have seen the blank look on Mary’s face. “Certificates of Deposit,” she explained. “They pay more interest than a savings account.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what interest is, don’t you?” She examined Mary closely.

  “Yes, even I know that,” she said.

  “I don’t know how you girls are going to do it. I can’t imagine.”

  Mary decided to ask Aunt Julia the question that had been burning in her mind ever since Kate got her acceptance letter from Stanford. “Why don’t you stay with us?” she said quickly.

  “What do you mean?” Aunt Julia perked up.

  Mary could tell she understood very well what she was asking, and even that she was glad to be asked. Mary didn’t know what her answer would be, but she knew Aunt Julia would have been deeply hurt if they hadn’t brought it up. “I mean live with us here, or wherever we are,” she said.

  By “us” Mary meant Mama and herself. Aunt Julia didn’t know about Stanford. Mary thought that maybe what was weighing Kate down was guilt at leaving Mama and Mary alone, and if Aunt Julia stayed with them, Kate wouldn’t feel so bad leaving. And it was all right to ask Aunt Julia without consulting Kate because, even though Kate never mentioned it, it was the best solution. Kate didn’t get along with Aunt Julia, but that wouldn’t affect her since she wouldn’t be around.

  “Gosh, child. My job, all my friends, my cats, my home is in San Jose.”

  It made Mary happy that she did not say no outright. “You can help us find a nice apartment with your own bedroom, and you can bring your cats, and maybe we can find a place close to St. John’s. Papa was friends with Father Hogan, and he would tell us about all the activities St. John’s has for seniors. They even have bingo every week. You’ll make new friends in no tim
e.”

  Aunt Julia hung her head down for a second. Her nose made a funny little twitch, as if she smelled something bad. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. That’s my sister in there,” she pointed to Mama’s bedroom with her chin, “and I’m the only living family you have.”

  Mary smiled. She always smiled when people said living family. It meant that people didn’t stop being family when they died; they just turned into your dead family.

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Julia continued. “I need to do some more thinking about that. I think you would be okay without me. You can hire someone with the money.” She glanced down at the insurance envelope. “Your sister will be down the street going to college and you’ll still be able to get home early.”

  “I don’t know if we can live by ourselves. Don’t we need an adult living with us?”

  “I guess your sister will need to be declared your guardian. She’s an adult. You’re not legally an adult, but you’re old enough to take care of yourself, or you should be, anyhow.” That was Aunt Julia’s way of joking.

  “Promise me you’ll think real hard about staying with us.” Mary looked at the envelope on the table. “We can live off the insurance money and maybe even pay you for taking care of Mama while we’re away.”

  Aunt Julia’s eyes lit up for a brief second. “Oh no,” she said quickly, “I wouldn’t do it for any money.”

  “But you promise me you’ll think about it. Really consider it.”

  “I promise. But maybe you should have asked your sister first. I’m not so sure she would like the idea of living with me on a permanent basis.”

  “Kate likes you, Aunt Julia. She has a lot of pressure on her right now, with school and everything. And . . . our papa just died. People mourn in different ways. Kate may seem distant and even angry sometimes, but that’s just her way of dealing with sadness.”

  “I guess you’re right. And who can blame her for being gloomy when the church where your father worked for twenty years is putting you out on the street?”

  Mary looked at Aunt Julia without any expression on her face.