"She called me three weeks ago," Marco said behind her. "From a number I didn't recognize. I almost didn't answer. She was crying. She said she had been sober for fourteen months. She said she was living in a sober house near West Chester. She said she needed help getting to Philadelphia twice a week, and the buses didn't line up with her shifts at the grocery store, and she had no one else to ask who wouldn't tell you before she was ready."
Elena turned. "Ready for what?"
Marco's voice dropped. "Your father is dying, Elena."
The sentence did not make sense at first. It sat in the air like a piece of furniture placed in the wrong room. Elena heard it again inside her head, testing the edges. Your father is dying. Ricardo Vega. Papa. The man who taught her to change a tire and to make arroz con gandules and to never leave a room angry if she could help it. The man who had stood between Carmen and the worst of Carmen's storms for years until the storms finally broke something in him that doctors had names for.
"Papa had a heart attack four years ago because of her," Elena said. Her voice shook now, not with softness but with the effort of holding old fury upright. "Because she crashed that car drunk. Because the hospital bills and the fear and the nights of not knowing where she was ate him alive. And now she calls you—you—to play chauffeur while he dies? And you say yes?"
"He asked for her," Marco said. "Ricardo asked for Carmen. And Carmen asked for me. Not because she wanted to replace you. Because she was terrified you would slam the door before she could deliver what he asked her to deliver."
"Which is?"