Chapter 7

Beto did not deny it. That was the worst part. He just stood there in his bolo tie with his hands hanging, and he nodded.

"How long."

"Since the beginning."

"Which beginning."

"October." His voice was wet. "October of 2004. Your mother called me from the house and she said there'd been an accident on the Trail and the county had called her and the casket had to stay closed."

"There was no accident."

"There was no accident."

Marisol's hand was still around the sugar skull. She looked down at it like she'd forgotten she was holding it.

"You drove me to the funeral," she said. "You sat next to me. I held your hand through the whole thing."

"I did."

"You let me cry at a box."

Beto reached into his jacket, into the inside pocket, and took out a folded paper that had gone soft as cloth. A funeral program. 2004. He had carried it for twenty years, and he unfolded it and looked at it because he could not look at her.

"I drove your mother to the airport," he said. "That October. She said she was going to see a lawyer in Sacramento. I didn't ask where she was going. I was forty-six and I was scared and she was my sister and I believed her." He folded the program back up. "I asked her once, in 2009. She said, Beto, if you ever say his name in front of my daughter I will never speak to you again. And then she got sick, and then she was gone, and then there was nobody left to ask."

Tommy had not moved. He stood with the dog against his boots and the box open on the wall behind him.

Marisol turned to him. Her face was doing three things at once and none of them were what he had spent twenty years dreading and rehearsing.

"Why now," she said.

"Because I couldn't come sooner. And I couldn't wait longer."

"You could have written."

"I did." He said it plainly. "For eleven years I wrote. From a place where they read everything before it goes out, and they read it, and then they decide. I wrote you forty-one letters, mija. I don't know how many you got."

She closed her eyes.

"None," she said. "I got none."

"I know."

Somewhere behind them a valet was arguing with a guest about a car key, and the string quartet had started up again, thin and cheerful and completely wrong for the moment.

Marisol looked up the drive at two hundred white chairs.

"I have to go put my shoes on," she said.

She said it like a woman walking out of a burning building to get her purse, and she turned and went, barefoot, up the aisle path, with the sugar skull still in her fist.

Priscilla Hollis was waiting for her at the top of the path. The groom's mother. Sixty-one, striking in a way that had cost money and discipline every year of her life, in a wide cream hat and a dress cut by someone who did not need the work.

Behind Priscilla stood a man in a navy suit holding a leather folder, and he was not a guest.

"Marisol," Priscilla said, and took her arm, gently, the way you take the arm of a horse that has spooked. "Before you go inside. I want the vendor list. The whole thing." She looked down the drive at Blaine Prescott. "And I want to know who changed it."