After the burial, at the house of a cousin, Carmen stood on the back porch smoking a cigarette she immediately put out when Elena appeared, guilty as a teenager. Elena almost scolded her. Instead she said, "Come inside. It's cold."
Carmen came inside.
In November, Elena asked Marco to show her the routes he had driven with Carmen—the sober house, the grocery store, the hospital entrance, the bus stop on Lancaster Avenue where he had dropped her the night the perfume was forgotten. They drove on a Sunday while Sofia stayed with a cousin. Marco narrated without flourish. Elena watched the places become real instead of imagined theaters for betrayal. At the bus stop she stood under the metal shelter and smelled diesel and wet leaves and understood, finally, the smallness of the scene Sofia had enlarged with a child's poetry. A lady. A ride. A forgotten bottle. A family almost undone by what those facts could mean when arranged in the wrong order.
"I invented a whole woman," Elena said. "Lipstick. Motel keys. A future without you. My mind was very talented that night."
"Your mind was trying to protect you by ending the story quickly," Marco said. "I gave it the ingredients."
Elena looked at the traffic. "If Sofia had not found the bottle, how long would you have waited?"
Marco did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was low. "I tell myself weeks. Honesty says I do not know. That uncertainty is part of what I have to carry."