“But not lately, given that I’m swamped with classes. Remind me again why I wanted to take summer term?”

She grabs a broom and I grab a dustpan, and together we start cleaning up the bits of drywall and dust left behind by the construction crew.

“To get your degree faster,” I say. “I told you to enjoy your last summer of freedom, but you didn’t listen.”

“I should have. I keep thinking back to when we were kids during summer break. Remember how we’d go to the pool at the JCC—”

“And the park.”

“And the library!” She smiles. “Your favorite.”

She’s right; our city library was a half mile from our apartment, and we’d walk there together. We’d each take a backpack and check out the limit—fifteen books each.

“You’d get all those big chapter books, then go home and read for hours,” she says. “I loved when you read to me.”

I’m happy to hear that; I’m not sure she fully understands why I did it, though. Each book was a doorway to another world, transporting us away from the chaos at home. Reading wasn’t just an escape; it was a lifeline.

“You know who else could read for hours and hours?” Georgia says, leaning on the broom. “Mom.”

I stiffen at the comparison.

“The difference is that she’d lose herself for days at a time and forget she had two daughters,” I say. Meanwhile, I always made sure Georgia was taken care of.

Georgia sighs. “I know.”

“Instead of facing her responsibilities like a grown-up, she wanted her Prince Charming to swoop in and turn life into a fantasy—just like in those books she read.” I try to keep my voice steady, but it’s not easy. “I don’t need a degree in psychology to know that isn’t healthy.”

It happened after every bad breakup: Mom would pull out her paperback romances, the ones with clinch covers featuring bare-chested men embracing women with heaving bosoms, and she’d hole up in her room for days at a time like they were an escape hatch from reality.

It was terrifying, but I had to pull myself together for Georgia’s sake. I’d make meals, walk her to school, do our laundry—even when I was barely big enough to reach into the washing machine in the basement of our building. Mom was fired from her job more times than I could count. Sometimes we ran out of food and I’d have nothing to feed Georgia but stale saltine crackers and cream of chicken soup. Once, Mom forgot to pay the gas bill and we spent a frigid night in January wearing three layers of clothes and shivering in bed.