"It's not up to me," Eric said. "He's sixteen."
"It's a little up to you," Daniel said. "He's going to watch how you handle it. You know that."
Eric looked at the man beside him. He had been prepared to hate him. He had spent a month half hoping to. He found that he could not, that what he felt instead was something stranger and more uncomfortable, a kind of terrible kinship, two men who had each been handed half a truth by the same scared young woman seventeen years ago and had each, in his own way, chosen not to look too closely.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. We'll figure it out."
Daniel let out a long breath and put out his hand, and Eric shook it.
On the drive home, the sun went down behind them over the Tucson Mountains, and Tyler sat in the passenger seat with a foil-wrapped stack of tamales in his lap that Rosa Reyes had pressed on him at the door, along with a hug that had lasted, he reported, about a full minute. He talked for the first forty miles without stopping. About Sofia, and Frijol, who really was the dumbest dog in Arizona. About Rosa, who had cried and called him mijo and showed him a photograph of her late husband, Tyler's grandfather, in his bus driver's uniform, and how Tyler had looked at it and seen his own face looking back. About Daniel's classroom, which he had seen pictures of, with a periodic table shower curtain. About the way Daniel laughed, quiet at first and then too long.
Then, near Picacho Peak, he went quiet, and when Eric glanced over, his son was asleep against the window with the tamales held in both arms like something precious.