“Send them the court order today.
Copy the DA’s office.”
Alvin called his mother from the courthouse steps.
Carmen answered on the second ring.
“It’s done,” he said.
A long silence.
Then a sound he hadn’t heard from his mother in years — a full, unguarded exhale, like something she had been holding in her chest for eight months had finally been allowed to leave.
“The house?” she whispered.
“Yours.
Legally, completely, right now.
Derek has seventy-two hours to vacate.”
Another silence.
He heard her say something away from the phone — his father’s name, just that, *Manuel* — and then he heard his father’s voice in the background, asking something, and then nothing for a moment.
When Carmen came back, her voice was different.
Quieter and fuller at the same time.
“Your father is sitting down,” she said.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s crying.” She paused.
“He doesn’t want me to tell you that.”
“Tell him I already know.”
He heard her relay it.
A short sound from his father that might have been a laugh.
Alvin took the long way back to the house — around the block, past Mrs.
Gable’s fence, down the side street where he used to ride his bicycle on summer mornings.
The neighborhood looked the same as it always had.
Deep porches.
Old oaks.
The smell of cut grass and river air.
He came in through the front gate.
His parents were standing on the front porch.
Not the side alley.
Not the back of the property.
The front porch, in the morning light, the way they had stood every Sunday morning for thirty-eight years.
Carmen came down the steps first.
She didn’t say anything.
She put both arms around him and held on.
Manuel followed.
He put one hand on Alvin’s shoulder and kept it there.
They stood like that for a moment — the three of them, on the front path, in front of the house that belonged to them.
Then Manuel said: “I want to eat breakfast at the kitchen table.”
Carmen laughed — a real laugh, sudden and surprised.
“Then let’s go inside,” Alvin said.
The kitchen was exactly as his mother had left it before Derek and Veronica moved in.
The same blue tile.
The same handmade wooden table that Manuel had built the year they were married.
