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“I don’t know what kind they like.” The phone buzzed against my hip bone. Mari.
    “It’s this kind. I’m sure.” He dropped a different box into the cart—a pregnancy test.
    “They definitely don’t need that.” I tried to put it back on the shelf, but he grabbed my arm.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “It’s a pregnancy test, Papi. I thought we were getting tampons?”
    And that wraps up the top-ten things a girl should never have to say to her father. . . .
    Papi snatched the test from my hands, chucked it back into the cart. “Young lady, I think I know what kind of shoes my own daughters wear.”
    The lump was back in my throat, threatening to choke off the air. My phone buzzed and buzzed and the overhead lights hummed and I gave Papi’s hand a gentle squeeze and leanedin close to whisper in his ear. “Please, Papi. I’m starving. Can we go?”
    “I’m not hungry.” He slipped out of my grasp and spiked a package of yellow-wrapped pads into the cart.
    “Jude?”
    I turned toward the voice at the end of the aisle: Zoe, hands on hips, red-gold curls lit by the fluorescent overheads. “What’s—”
    “Oh, good! Mariposa is here. Is this the kind you like, querida ?” Papi reached for her as she approached, holding up another package of pads so she could see.
    “Papi,” I said gently, “this is Zoe. Mariposa isn’t here.”
    “Zoe?” He looked at her as if she were a stranger, as if she hadn’t spent most of her childhood camping out in our backyard and sneaking ice cream sandwiches from our freezer. I nodded slowly, praying that Zoe wouldn’t say anything to further scramble the circuitry between his ears.
    His face filled with recognition. “Do you . . . do you girls need a ride to school? Or . . . no. First I have to get some things for Araceli, then . . . are we at Burger Barn?” He drifted off, his eyes suddenly red and watery.
    I wanted Zoe to leave. To turn around without saying another word, to forget she’d come here. Because if anything was worse than seeing a grown man lose it in the tampon aisle, it was seeing a grown man cry because he didn’t remember how he’d gotten to the tampon aisle in the first place.
    Zoe didn’t move, and Papi turned his head from side toside as if that would help him get his bearings. The stock boy returned to his arranging, but he was straightening the same boxes over and over, his neck and ears bright red.
    Papi continued to look around, baffled and humiliated, and I closed my eyes, silently repeating the mantra the social worker doled out after we got the news: It’s not my father, it’s the disease. It’s not my father, it’s the disease. . . .
    “We’re at the pharmacy,” I told him. “We had Burger Barn the other day, so let’s try the Cantina. I’ve been craving their chips and guacamole.”
    I touched Papi’s elbow, and his eyes cleared. He looked from me to Zoe with renewed focus, sharp and determined.
    “My daughters asked me to pick this stuff up for them, can you believe that? But I do it. Because we do what we can, right?”
    Zoe forced a smile. “Jude, um, let’s get coffee another day. I’ll tell Christina . . . um . . . call me when you get home, okay?”
    Her eyes were glassy and frantic, and she zoomed toward the door as if the place were on fire, and a woman behind us whispered to her companion, “I think that’s her father, poor thing.”
    “Let’s go eat.” I tugged on Papi’s shirtsleeve, but he shook me off immediately.
    “Jude Hernandez, you will settle down and behave yourself in public.”
    I was five years old again, wilting in the Colorado heat, whining to go home after a long day of errands. People were watching us; the burn of their collective stare scorched myskin. My phone kept buzzing in my pocket, and my tongue was fat and stupid and useless. “Papi—”
    “¡Cállate!” His command was short and firm, and I did as he ordered: Shut up. He dropped another box