The week without them

The agreement says the girls are with me every other week, Sunday to Sunday. We signed it three years ago in an office on Américas Avenue that smelled of reheated coffee, and at the time it seemed fair, orderly, almost elegant. I'm an accountant: a two-column table always looks elegant to me. What the table didn't include was what the house sounds like on Monday morning of the week that isn't mine.

It sounds like the fridge. I had never noticed that my fridge makes a noise like someone sighing before they say something and then changing their mind. On their weeks you can't hear it, because Ximena puts on music the second she opens her eyes (some Korean thing I don't understand and now know by heart) and Renata fights with the hair dryer as if it owed her money.

The inventory

In the first few months I did something I've never told anyone. On Sunday night, after dropping them off at their mom's, I'd come home and take inventory. Literally. I'd walk through the house and see what they'd left behind: a sock with an embroidered avocado, a hair tie in the sink, Renata's charger, which she would later demand back over WhatsApp as if I'd hidden it. I left everything where it was. I didn't pick anything up. Picking things up felt like admitting something.

My sister Lupe, who is smarter than me and knows it, once told me that was a very accountant thing to do: keeping a record of what's missing. I laughed, but I drove home thinking she was right and that I didn't like her being right.

What I do now

Now I pick up the sock. I wash it, fold it and put it in her drawer. I don't know when that changed; there wasn't a special day. I think I just got tired of living in a museum.

On the weeks without them I work longer hours, I'll admit. I stay at the office until eight closing reconciliations that could wait. I eat dinner standing in the kitchen, usually one of the bolillos I baked on Saturday with beans and cheese, and I tell myself that tomorrow I'll cook something decent. On Tuesday night, without fail, I cook something decent. By Wednesday, I don't.

I sleep differently, too. On their weeks I sleep lightly, as if part of me stayed on watch: is Ximena coughing, is Renata home yet (she is, she texted, but still). On the weeks without them I sleep like a stone, and sometimes I wake up at four in the morning with the feeling I left something on the stove.

Thursday

Thursday is the worst day and I can't explain why. Half the week is gone, it's almost over, it should be the other way around. But Thursday is when I realize it's been four days since anyone said "Dad, can I borrow…?", that nobody has asked me what's for dinner, and that my longest conversation was with the gas delivery guy about whether it's going to rain.

This Thursday Ximena sent me a forty-second voice message. She wanted to know if I remembered the name of the dog movie we watched when she was six. I didn't. I told her so and asked why. She answered "just because" with a dog emoji. I listened to that message maybe five times. At the end she says "okay, bye" and you can hear her mom in the background saying something to her, and I was glad to hear her mom in the background, which is not something I could have said three years ago.

Tomorrow is Sunday. I pick them up at six. There's dough rising in the oven, turned off, with the little light on to keep it warm, because a month ago Renata said she missed conchas and I don't know how to make conchas. I'm on my third attempt. The third one looked like a concha if you saw it from far away and with love.

The fridge is still sighing. I hardly hear it anymore.