It ends because one person keeps taking small pieces out of the floor and the other person keeps standing on it anyway.

Part Sixteen: Coyoacán

My mother was from Mexico City.

She came to San Diego at twenty-two and married my father and stayed, and for the whole of my childhood Clara and I spent four weeks every summer at my grandmother’s house on a street in Coyoacán with jacaranda trees that ruined everything they dropped on.

My grandmother died when I was nineteen and the house went to a cousin and I had not been back in a decade, and when the escrow closed and I sat down with a number in front of me, I found that I had already decided.

I bought a small place four streets from where my grandmother’s had been.