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“These are acceptable,” my mother says.

“They’re perfect,” Rosa says. “Eat another one. You’re too skinny.”

Luke and I stand in the kitchen doorway. Elena is on the couch, watching the two mothers with the dawning realisation that the two most powerful forces in this family have found common ground, and that the common ground is us.

“We’re doomed,” I say.

“We were already doomed,” Luke says. “This is just the universe’s way of giving us confirmation.”

Elena takes a Froot Loop from the box. She puts it in her mouth. She chews slowly, watching my mother and Rosa negotiate the terms of our reproductive future over tostones and a chequebook.

“I like her,” Elena says, nodding toward my mother. “She’s terrifying. But the prenup thing is absolute genius.”

From the table, without turning around, my mother says: “I heard that. And thank you. It took me six weeks to draft. Frederick’s lawyers never stood a chance.”

Elena grins. It is the first time she has grinned in this apartment without the grin being aimed at Luke or at my expense. It is aimed at my mother, and my mother – somehow, impossibly – catches it.

Something has shifted. Not warmly. Structurally. A new alliance, formed over fried plantain and fraud, that nobody in this room saw coming and nobody in this room can stop.

The dog emerges from under the cushion. She looks around. She vibrates.

Welcome back, Duchess.

Chapter 6

Some Assembly Required

LUKE

Garza, the construction worker who had the encounter with the rebar, comes back on a Tuesday, and this time nobody’s screaming.

He’s in a sling, two weeks out from the extraction, here for a follow-up that ortho could’ve handled but he asked for me. The arm’s healing clean. Good colour, good cap refill, sensation intact in all five fingers. He makes a fist for me – slow, careful, complete – and grins like he’s just benched a car.

“Look at that,” he says. “Still mine.”

“Still yours. Keep doing the exercises.”

“My wife makes me do them at the table. She counts.” He watches me chart. “Settlement came through. Workers’ comp. The foreman’s finished, by the way. OSHA went through that site like the angel of death with a clipboard. It was like fucking poetry.”

“Good.”

“You know I almost didn’t take it?” He says it easily, the way people confess things in exam rooms – to the middle distance, with their shoes on. “The settlement. Felt like charity. Like I was getting something I didn’t work for. My wife sat me down at the kitchen table and she said, ‘Manuel, taking what you’re owed isn’t charity. It’s the terms.’” He shrugs with his good shoulder. “Smart woman. I married up.”

“Sounds like it.”

“You married?”

“Yeah.”

“Up or down?”

I think about a garment rack. A drunk archbishop. A man who names WiFi networks after appliances.

“Definitely up,” I say.

Garza laughs, and it doesn’t come out wet this time. I discharge him with a follow-up in four weeks and a printout he won’t read, and I finish my charts before 19:00 for the first time in a month, and the whole drive home his wife’s sentence rides in the passenger seat.

Taking what you’re owed isn’t charity. It’s the terms.