It was his daughter’s bedroom, painted a startling silver, shelves and crates filled with toys and games crammed into every nook and corner possible. It was clean, though, immaculately so, like the master bedroom, the woven rug in the middle with jumping sheep lint-free, no childlike stains.

Near the bed was a mobile with stars, multicolored and metallic, like a Dorothy Gillespie sculpture but less bristly. I touched one, hesitantly, watched the individual dangling star swing in space, catch the light from the window.

And then I felt a hand on the small of my back and I turned around, to him.

I remembered, then, that I was still nude save for my underwear. He was dressed in an expensive-looking sweatshirt, nice-fitting jeans, scruff on his face and a greasy paper bag in his hand.

“I thought you had left,” he said, kissing my forehead. “That I’d failed.”

“I was giving myself a tour. I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

He shook the paper bag, the smell of bacon wafting out. “Breakfast. You looked pretty sound asleep.” And I followed him back into the master bedroom, the breakfast soon forgotten as we got back into bed, the rest of the morning slow and luxurious, tantalizing and gratifying.

It didn’t occur to me then, that the vanity so plump with cosmetics, could be a warning sign. That a child who apparently lived with her mother, wouldn’t want to take more of her things with her. For all my streetwise knowledge, my self-defense skills, it didn’t matter. I wanted what I wanted in those moments and I devoured it, without a second thought.

12

Present day

We give Hamano a week to leave.

We aren’t cruel about it. We actively help her find a place. She’s subleasing anyway, with the original stipulation that I could come back at any time. I don’t feel bad.

Mom gives me money. She wants me out of her hair so badly that she just forks over enough to pay for a few months’ rent, and then some. I didn’t ask. In fact, we don’t speak again after she exploded at me. I just check my bank account the following day and suddenly there’s money in it, transferred from hers.

Within the week we give Hamano to move out, I pack. I avoid my computer except to network, look for job leads. I take with me things I should have removed long ago, old clothes and books and magazines I coveted as a kid, that Mom has put in storage in her attic. I don’t want to come back here. I don’t want any excuse to face her again.