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feel lonely and scared again and forget how bad he’d made her feel and how much he’d hurt her, and she’d call him up and start the whole thing all over again.
    Gabriela was thirty- one years old. She knew her life would never change, that she would never be happy all the time, but her doctors told her her HIV was doing okay and she would live for many, many years. Manuela was eleven years old, in sixth grade, and was turning into such a beautiful young lady. Gabriela taught her daughter to stay away from drugs and the bad boys and to wait to meet somebody someday who would treat her good, the way she deserved to be treated. Gabriela just wanted her daughter to have a good, happy life; it was the only thing she cared about.
    Then one day Gabriela was riding the bus home from work when Beatrice called her and was screaming and crying. It reminded Gabriela of that terrible day Juan had died, and she was afraid something bad had happened to Manuela.
    “ No mi hija! ” Gabriela screamed. “ No mi hija! No mi hija! ” Gabriela screamed so loud that everybody was looking over, and the driver even stopped the bus.
Thank God, Beatrice wasn’t calling about Manuela, but it was still very bad. It was their father in San Juan. He was very sick and needed a new kidney or he was going to die, but the doctors in Quito said he was too sick to get a new kidney from the hospital, so the only way was if they bought one on the black market.
Crying, Gabriella asked, “How much do they need?”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Beatrice said. “That’s crazy money. What’re we gonna do?”
Gabriela didn’t have money to send him. The money she made from cleaning houses was just enough to pay for rent and bills and food. Sometimes she didn’t even have money to buy new clothes for Manuela.
“How much money you have?” Gabriela asked.
“We only have two thousand in the bank,” Beatrice said, “and we need it for rent and bills.”
Gabriela had no idea what to do. Twelve thousand dollars was more money than she’d ever seen.
When she got back to her apartment, she called home and it was sad to hear her mother crying and her father sounding so sad, and she felt so bad, knowing there was nothing anybody could do to help him. They just had to let him die.
“How much time does papi have?” Gabriela asked her mother.
“If they don’t do nothing, maybe a month or two,” she said.“They don’t know.”
Gabriela spent most of the next few days crying. She and Beatrice were planning to go to Ec ua dor, to be with their father for the last time. They wanted their whole families to go, but they didn’t have the money for the plane tickets.
Everything seemed so bad, and she didn’t know what to do, and then she was cleaning the Blooms’ house one morning when she saw a little piece of paper in a drawer in the dining room. The paper had some numbers on it, and on top she saw the words code new alarm.
Mrs. Bloom was home, right upstairs, and Gabriela heard footsteps in the hallway. Gabriela didn’t even think about it and put the paper in the pocket of her apron.
Later, at home, she felt bad. She didn’t even know why she took the paper, because the Blooms had been so good to her and there was no way she could ever steal from them.
Then, in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought: What if she gave Carlos the code? She didn’t ask about where he got his money, but she knew he probably knew how to rob places. And if he stole from them it would be different than if she stole from them. She didn’t want to do something bad to the Blooms, but she didn’t want her papi to die, either, and she didn’t know what else to do
She called Carlos and told him to come over.
After she told him about the code, he said, “You got the key to the house?”
Gabriela hadn’t even thought about this. She was so worried about her papi and getting money that she hadn’t thought about anything else.
“No, but I can get it,” she said.
The next day, at the Blooms’, when she went out to