Chapter 3 - The House Without Its Photographs
Pilar lived across from our family house, where my grandmother had raised two boys on a seamstress's wages and a garden full of stubborn tomatoes. She opened her door before I knocked twice.
"I knew you would come," she said. "You look like your father when he's angry."
My father had been dead twenty-two years. Pilar told me an ambulance had taken Sara away three days earlier. "Claudia said she'd fainted. But she'd been sleeping all day for weeks, Hugo. I asked whether she'd seen a doctor. Claudia told me to mind my business."
"What happened Thursday?"
Pilar hesitated. Then she led me to her kitchen window. From there I could see our back gate and the patch of orange trees my grandfather had planted.
"A man came in a gray car. Suit, leather case. Claudia made Sara sit at the patio table. Your grandmother kept saying she wanted to call you. He told her the papers were just permission for medical care."
"Did she sign?"
"I couldn't see. But she was barely awake."
Our house smelled wrong when I entered it: perfume and furniture polish instead of coffee and fried bread. The framed photographs were missing from the stairwell. So was the wooden box containing my parents' letters. In the kitchen, I found Sara's medication organizer, empty except for two tablets in the wrong compartment.
I took pictures without disturbing anything. At the back door a new chain hung across the courtyard gate. Sara never locked that gate. She gave neighborhood children lemons and let old people sit in the shade.
On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a donkey, was a note in Claudia's handwriting: PACK BEFORE FRIDAY. KEYS TO V.
I called Mateo. He answered on the fourth ring.
"Hugo? You're home?"
"Why is Abuela in the hospital?"
Silence. Then: "Claudia said she had the flu."
"She was lying. And somebody's selling our house."
Mateo breathed hard into the phone. "That's impossible. I signed papers for repairs, not a sale."
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At my feet lay a torn corner of a printed document. I picked it up.
Beneath the address was Mateo's signature—followed by the words IRREVOCABLE CONSENT.
