The narrator opens this story by stating, “The day before Pearla Ortiz killed a man, she had lunch at home with her granddaughter Alana” (105). Alana works in marketing, in a skyscraper downtown. Presently, she tells her grandmother that they will be looking at a few housing communities for the elderly that week. Alana has previously encouraged her grandmother to sell her home on Galapago Street to move into senior housing. Alana reasoned that the rental market would fetch her grandmother a good price, and that senior living facilities were much better and sophisticated places than they once were.

Pearla avoids responding to Alana’s assertion that they will soon be looking at facilities: “Her granddaughter looked so bossy in her career clothes, but whenever Pearla looked at her, really looked at her, she still saw Alana as an eight-year-old girl who had come to live with her grandparents on Galapago Street after her mother, Mercedes, died. Alana arrived with nothing more than a suitcase filled with stuffed animals and chapter books” (106).

When Alana came to live with Pearla and her husband Avel, tending to the family grief became one of Pearla’s additional responsibilities. Although she often found ways to drown out the sound of Avel’s crying to protect Alana from hearing it, Pearla now wonders whether she should have let her grandmother hear those cries.