About a half hour later, we pull up to the house; it looks almost wild. Bushes have grown over the front window; and a big pecan tree, full of leaves, has put most of the front yard in shade. The grass hasn’t been cut in a while. Some of it’s gone yellow, but it’s long enough you can see the seeds, too; it looks like green wheat. “I meant to get Mario to come,” Granma says. “I wanted to make everything nice, but he’s coming next week. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re here.”

“Thanks for picking us up,” Mom says.

The house needs painting, too. The walls are supposed to be white, but a lot of the boards are peeling, and you can see gray wood underneath the paint. I get out of the car and stretch my legs again; there’s a kind of dust in the air, which sticks to the sweat on my skin. I feel dirty, from the airplane, too. But I don’t really mind. It’s so hot that all you can think about is getting cool. Or not even that—you don’t even think, you just try to move as little as possible, because every time you move, you feel the heat; and what it feels like is this, like a voice in your head saying, I’m here, I’m really here. New York feels like a long time ago.

It takes Granma a while to get the key in the lock. Mom piles the suitcases on the front porch; I help her carry them from the trunk of the Volvo. Granma is still fussing with the door. “I’m so clumsy,” she says. But the key finally turns and we go in. It’s a little bit cooler inside but not much.

I follow Mom as we wheel the suitcases into the bedroom at the end of the hall. “Just to get them out of the way,” she says. Granma has a small house. It’s all on one floor—there are only two bedrooms, so when we stayed in Texas over Christmas, Mom and Dad had to sleep on the living room sofa. Everybody fought to get into the bathroom; nobody seemed in a good mood. “But this time around, things will be different,” Mom had promised me on the airplane flight. She meant because Dad isn’t here. We’re going to sleep in the same room, with two beds in opposite corners. At least until we find our own place to stay . . .

“Is this okay, Ben?” she says, quietly, so Granma doesn’t hear. “I mean, you don’t mind sharing, do you?”

I can tell that Mom is trying to give me a chance to talk, to say what I’m really thinking, because it’s not just me and her anymore, it’s Granma as well. It’s Granma’s house. I guess it’s Mom’s house, too, because she grew up in it, but it’s not really mine. I’m like a guest.

“I don’t mind.”

“It’ll be fun,” she says, in that voice she sometimes uses when she wants to show that everything’s going to be fine.