“Don’t make me worry, Tam. Next time, we have to talk before you go out. And maybe we need to have another talk too . . .” She glances meaningfully toward the kitchen.

“Mom!” Now I’m the one who sounds like a sitcom girl. She just laughs and tells me to go get her purse. She takes out a pale blue envelope.

“It’s a birthday card,” she says. “From my aunt. She’s pretty radical, for a nun. Lives in Oakland and runs an after-school program. She knows a lot about our family.”

I open the card. It’s a classic Hallmark about how my mom is an amazing niece, but the signature has a note: Missing you, mija, it says.

“She sends one every year.” Now it’s Mom’s turn to look a little teary-eyed. “Maybe we should go and see her. She’s not like—not like my dad.” There is a pause like there always is when she mentions her father, short but Grand Canyon deep. As I get older, I see the outline of the broken story there, the something too hard for me to hear that lives in the space between her words. She takes a little breath and goes on. “I just assumed she judges me like my parents do, but maybe not. She sends a card like this every year.”

“That’s pretty sweet,” I say, tracing the raised flowers on the card’s face. “She sounds nice.”

“She used to be,” my mom says. “Maybe she still is.”

“Only one way to find out,” I say, squeezing her hand.

“Maybe Sunday,” Mom says. “Now, go help that cute boy with the dishes. They are yours for the foreseeable future, some nice quiet time to think about how you could have given your mother a heart attack. And tell him he can stay till whenever it is his parents expect him home from wherever it was he told them he would be. But just this once. I can’t be an accessory to minors lying to their parents.” Her smile makes me remember stories of how strict her parents were, and how she and my dad used to come up with elaborate schemes to sneak her out.

In the kitchen, Marco makes me sit in the breakfast nook instead of helping while he finishes up.

“My mom says you can hang out till the coast is clear at home.”

“I love your mom,” Marco says.

We go into the living room and plop on the sofa. I grab my backpack from the coffee table where I’d dropped it and dig for my lip balm again—but find something that definitely wasn’t there when I left the house a million years ago/this morning. A glitter-crusted cassette case labeled pochas mix in pink nail polish that gives me an instant flashback to Lourdes’s bedroom.