I rent two rooms from him

Four seventy-five for the two rooms in the back. That's with the water and the light in it. He's never said different and I've never asked him.

The internet I pay myself, sixty-one dollars, because Danny's got the Chromebook from the school and he needs it at night. El señor doesn't touch it. He's got the television.

You don't find two rooms in Alief for that. My cousin pays nine hundred for a one bedroom with a lady upstairs who walks around all night.

There's no paper on it. I put the money under the sugar jar on the first and by the afternoon it's gone.

The house is the yellow one on Cook Road with the carport leaning a little on the left. I've got the back room. My sister's got the other one, her and the two kids.

I do framing, and drywall when the framing's slow. Six days most weeks.

I'm five four. I keep a bucket in the bed of the truck, the orange one from Home Depot, and I stand on it to reach the top plate. The guys know that and they call me over anyway. Beto will be up on the wall with his arms and he'll go, come here, primo, and point at something way up at the top, and the whole crew stands there waiting while I walk out to the truck for my bucket. Twelve years of that. It's still funny to them.

El señor is sixty. He has the front room with the television and he keeps it going all night, the news and then whatever soccer's on, and it's still going when I get up.

His wife passed before we came. There's pots out on the porch he waters in the morning out of a Gatorade bottle he fills at the kitchen sink.

In the house I call him señor. My sister uses his name.

Yesenia's six and she sits on the floor of the front room in the morning because his TV is bigger than the little one we have back there. He doesn't say anything about it. He just has it on the cartoons already by the time she comes out.

He cooks on Sundays. Makes a pot of something and it's more than one man eats, and it sits on the stove with the lid on. My sister makes plates for the kids out of it and tells him thank you and he doesn't answer, he just picks his hand up a little without looking away from the television.

August, after the storm. The power was out four days. The light company said Thursday and it came back Saturday around noon.

It was ninety-something inside at night. My sister took the kids out to her friend's place where they had lights. I stayed because somebody had to be at the house. The second day I got a bag of ice and put what was in the refrigerator into the cooler.

The second night he had the radio going in the front room and two candles from the church, the tall ones in the glass. I went in there because that's where the radio was. He put his hand on my leg and I left it there. It got to be almost four before I went back to my room and laid down on top of the sheet with the fan not going.

He never said anything about it after. The window unit's in my sister's room because hers is the window that takes it. The other one's got the metal frame and the bracket doesn't sit on it right. I tried it twice, once with a piece of one-by under it, and it still doesn't sit. So it's in hers and the kids sleep cold and I'm back there with the door open.

Some things, though. He started leaving coffee in the pot. Before, he'd rinse it out when he was done, and now there's a cup or so in there every morning.

My sister asked me why I don't say something to him about the back corner of the ceiling, since it drips when it's coming down hard. I told her I'd get to it.

She let it go. She works nights doing laundry at the hospital and she isn't looking for a problem with anybody.

Danny's at the school two streets over. Mrs. Pham had him last year and she called me about his reading, and I wrote out what I wanted to say on a piece of paper before I called her back. We move, it's a different school.

Chuy told me about a house, three bedrooms, eleven hundred, and his brother-in-law would put me in there without running the credit. I never called him back.

The son came around in September. He drives a truck with the ladder rack on it. He walked down to the back and looked at our two doors and didn't come in, and then he was in the kitchen with his dad a while. I heard him say a number. His dad said we pay on the first. The son took a plate of something to go and el señor stood out at the curb until the truck turned at the corner.

Trash is Tuesday now. It was Wednesday before and they moved it in the spring, and the can has to go out the night before because the truck comes down our side first, some weeks before six. I put it out Monday when I get in. He's never had to ask me about it.

October, he came out of the bathroom and sat down on the arm of the chair, which he doesn't do, and his color was wrong. I took him to the clinic on Bissonnet.

The woman at the front had a clipboard and she asked me how I was related to him. I told her I live in the house. She typed something in. I don't know what she put.

They had him in the back about two hours. It was the blood pressure. He'd had the pills in the kitchen drawer since August and hadn't taken one. I read his name off the blue card so I'd say it right for her, and then I gave the card back to him.

We got the refill at the Walgreens. He wanted to pay for it himself and he counted the money out slow in the truck with the door open and the bell going. I let him. He was going to anyway.

On the way back he said Honduras was playing Thursday. I said okay.

The drip got worse in November. He came and stood in the doorway of my room with a Home Depot bag and he'd bought the wrong sheetrock, the half inch, so I went and got the five eighths for the ceiling. I set the bucket down under the corner and got up on it with the screw gun and he held it while I was up there. After, in the kitchen, he paid me back out of his shirt pocket in twenties and asked me what the tax came to.