Chapter 6

She stopped four feet from him.

Twenty years is a long time. He was sixty-three now and she was twenty-nine and the last time she had seen him he had been forty-three and she had been nine, sitting on the tailgate of a green flatbed eating a plum.

She looked at his face and did not know it.

"I don't know you," she said. Her voice was very level. Her hands were not.

"I know," Tommy said. "You got taller. That's the whole thing. You got taller and I missed it."

"You're not-" She stopped. Started again. "My father is buried in St. Helena. I've been to the grave. I've been every year since I was nine."

"I know where they put it."

That landed badly, and he saw it land, and he did not chase it.

Behind them, Prescott had recovered his clipboard and his badge and his voice. "Ms. Vega, this man is not on any list. He's been directed off the property twice. I need you to go back up to the path so we can-"

"Give him the box," Marisol said.

Nobody moved.

"The box," she said, louder. "Nell. Bring it out."

Nell Farraday went into the office and came back with the white bakery box tied in butcher twine, and she carried it the way the old man had carried it, flat and level, because she had felt the weight of it on a desk.

Tommy took it. He set it on the low stone wall by the gate and worked the knot with two gnarled fingers, and when the twine came loose the lid lifted half an inch and one small thing rolled out onto the gravel.

Marisol crouched down and picked it up.

A sugar skull. Small, the size of a plum. White icing, piped with a steady hand in careful, cramped letters.

Marisol.

She turned it over. There were dates on the back. Not one date. A row of them, tiny, going down the curve of the skull like a column in a ledger.

"That's my father's hand," she said.

The whole drive went quiet.

"Handwriting can be copied," Prescott said. "Everybody here has seen a stranger with a story. That's what this is. That's all this is."

And Nell Farraday, twenty-four years old, who had been awake since five and who had spent two years feeding that dog when Marisol was in Chile for harvest, said the thing that broke it open.

"He won't come when Marisol calls him." Her voice was small and it carried. "He won't come for food. He won't come for the car. The only thing that dog has ever lifted his head for is a two-note whistle, and nobody on this property has used it in twenty years."

Marisol went very still.

She remembered it. She remembered being nine and hearing it from the end of a vine row, two notes, low then high, and the puppy coming flat-out through the dust with his ears back.

Tommy didn't do it to prove anything. He did it because it was what he did.

Two fingers in his mouth. Two notes.

The old heeler came off his knees, turned three tight circles the way he had as a puppy, and lay down across Tommy Reyes's boots.

Marisol made a sound that had no word in it.

"Papi?"

And ten feet away, Beto Vega-Ortiz said her name - just her name, like a warning, like a prayer.

She turned and looked at her uncle. The man who had joked all morning. The man who had driven her to every cello lesson. The man who had stood in for a dead father at her quinceañera.

"You knew," she said.