A day in the life: Antonya Nelson's current New Yorker story

I have always like Antonya Nelson's writing and am glad to see her story Literally in current New Yorker. That title alone tells you something about her style - witty, clever, impish, observant - funny like Lorrie Moore but not as depressed. She writes really well about adolescents - her primary protagonists. Current story is a good if not great example of her work: story of a broken family in mid-America (Houston, in this case - many of her stories set in Midwest or Southwest cities), in this case father widowed (wife died several years ago in car accident), working in ad department of a a newspaper, raising a teenage daughter and 6th-grade (I think) son; story centers on the mingled relations between this family and the family of his maid/housekeeper, whose son is clearly a troubled and highly nervous boy who's best friends with widowed dad's son (I forget the names, unfortunately). The main speaks only broken English; dad tries to converse with her, but this used to be the wife's forte, and the relationship is now difficult, but friendly and pleasant. Maid is a single mom, her ex (husband? boyfriend?) is in and out of the picture and apparently, at least to the son, a scary and dangerous figure. Nelson does something sort of surprising - in an Alice Munro-like swerve, she focuses the story initially on the teenage daughter, as we watch her prepare her Catholic school uniform ahead of the day in school - but then the daughter kind of vanishes from the story, which turns out to be about the boys. A lot happens in the short one-day span of this story: the boys, allowed to stay home from school (improbably, I would think) hop on a bus and go to the maid's apartment in a pretty raw part of Houston (also improbable, for well-behaved and timid 6th graders, but possible) - when the dad and maid cannot find them, they panic, then make a guess as to where they'll be, drive to the maid's place, find them there and also, in the hallway, the scary estranged dad. He gets into the apartment, and eventually the broken nuclear family - dad, daughter, son - convene at the end of the day. I feel that something's kind of missing from this story - or, put another way, it's a missed opportunity. All this set-up about the dangerous estranged father and then, pouf, nothing happens with him. No doubt that's Nelson's intention - the scary dad is not much different from the conventional middle-class dad - but it seems as if the story never brings all the events together to a conclusion, even and open-ended conclusion, an epiphany or a statement of mood. Still, very good writing in the story, well delineated characters, and maybe Nelson plans to do more with these characters in an other piece.