Alder Falls woke up the way it always did in the last week of September, with a thin skin of fog on the river and the buses already sighing out of the depot yard before the light had properly decided what color it wanted to be. Tomas Herrera heard the first one from his kitchen. He heard it every morning, a long hydraulic exhale followed by the rattle of a loose panel somewhere along its flank, and every morning he made the same small note in the back of his mind, the way other men remembered to buy milk. Bus forty-one. Rear door seal. It would keep for another week if nobody forced it, and somebody always forced it.
He was standing at the stove in a T-shirt and work socks, one hand on the handle of a pan that had belonged to his wife, watching two eggs firm up at the edges, when Sofia came out of her room dragging her blanket behind her like a small, defeated flag. She was seven years old and serious in the mornings, and she climbed onto the stool at the counter without being asked and put her chin in her hands and studied him the way she studied everything that mattered to her, which was completely and without blinking.
"You burned the toast yesterday," she informed him.
"I remember," Tomas said.
"Grandma says you burn it because you think about buses."
"Grandma says a lot of true things before breakfast. It is one of her talents."
He slid the eggs onto a plate, cut the toast he had made that morning into triangles because triangles were, by house law, the correct shape, and set both in front of her with a glass of milk he had already poured and kept cold in the fridge in its own spot, because Sofia believed, correctly, that milk from a warm carton tasted like a lie. He poured coffee for himself into the chipped blue mug and drank it standing up, the way he drank everything, the way he ate most meals that were not witnessed by his daughter and therefore subject to rules about sitting down like a person.
The apartment was small and clean in the particular way of a place cleaned by a man who had learned cleaning as a form of apology. After Marisol died, three years ago come November, Tomas had let everything slide for exactly eleven days, and on the twelfth day his mother had come over with a mop, a casserole, and an expression that ended all discussion, and she had scrubbed his kitchen floor on her knees while he sat at this same counter with his head in his hands, and she had told him, not unkindly, that grief was not a permission slip. "Your daughter eats in this room," she had said. "So this room gets cleaned. The rest of you can fall apart on your own schedule." He had never let it slide again. The floors got mopped on Sundays. Sofia's drawings went on the fridge in strict rotation, oldest to the folder, folder to the box, box to the shelf, because a system was the only way he knew to keep love from turning into clutter, or clutter from turning into an excuse.
"This one stays," Sofia said now, around a mouthful of egg, pointing with her fork at the newest drawing, which showed three figures holding hands in front of a house that had a sun in the corner wearing sunglasses. The figures were labeled in large, wobbling capitals. PAPA. ME. ABUELA. Above them, on what was meant to be the roof, a fourth figure stood smaller and slightly apart, with wings that might have been arms and arms that might have been wings. MAMA, it said, in letters she had traced twice to make them darker.
"That one stays as long as you want," Tomas said, and meant it, and turned away to rinse the pan under hot water because there were some mornings his face needed a task to hide behind, and rinsing a pan was as good as any he had ever found.