“Your daughter?”

“The neighbor’s girl,” she said. “I watch her after school until her mom gets home from work. Sit down, Mister Rios. You want coffee?”

“Call me Henry,” I said. “Coffee would be nice.” The earthy scent of beans made my stomach growl, more out of memory than appetite. “Sorry.”

“You’re hungry,” Mrs. Trejo said.

“No, I’m—”

“I’ll make you a taco. Sit, sit.”

I pulled out a chair. Nick sat down across from me, where the newspaper was spread. He watched me warily as I removed a legal pad from my briefcase, laid it on the table, and took a pen from my pocket.

“I just have a couple of questions to ask,” I said. “About the accident.”

He took a deep breath but it was his mother who spoke.

“Nick is still very upset about what happened to Bill.”

“I can understand that. You were close.”

“They were together for four years,” she continued, setting a mug of coffee before me. “There’s sugar in the bowl. You want milk?”

“No, black is fine,” I said, grappling with the implication that Nick’s mother seemed to know about his relationship, but I had probably misunderstood her meaning; she must have meant only that they had been roommates for four years.

Then Nick said, “He was my first boyfriend.”

I glanced at Mrs. Trejo who went on warming a tortilla on a griddle. I had not been mistaken. She was a Mexican mother who knew her son was gay, had had a boyfriend and seemed unbothered by either fact. It was completely alien to my own experience and it took me a moment to refocus my attention to the task at hand.

“You must have been very young when you met him.”

“Eighteen,” Nick said. “Ma, can I have some coffee too?”

“How did you meet?”

He glanced at his mother while she filled the mug in front of him. He spooned sugar into it and said, “I was a freshman at SF State. Some friends of mine and I would go down to the Castro and hang out near the bars. We couldn’t go in, but we liked being close to the action. One night I was wandering around alone and ran into Bill. We got to talking and he gave me a ride back to my dorm. I asked him for his number and called him up the next day. That’s how it started.”

Mrs. Trejo snorted skeptically as she set a plate before me with a taco of beans. “There’s salsa if you want.”