In the kitchen Dad is half-dressed in his usual gray coveralls with the top hanging around his waist and with a fresh undershirt up top. Mom never let him wear his coveralls in the house before, but now I guess Dad can make his own rules.

My dad is a painter. Not some fancy-schmancy art-school painter. He paints houses and buildings and rooms and basically anything that could need painting. Sometimes, though, businesses ask him to come paint designs in their windows, like for holidays or big sales. He’s never said so, but part of me has always wondered if he secretly likes those special jobs best.

“How’s the bacon?” Dad asks through a mouthful of hash browns.

I brush my toes against the leg of the kitchen table, just to be sure there are no claw scratches from Cheese. “Very dead,” I tell him.

He kisses his fingers like a chef. “Maybe we could make some baked ziti tonight?” he asks. “Then catch up on Jeopardy!?”

“I think Mom has Mondays,” I remind him. I moved in on a Sunday, and the plan is that Dad gets Friday, Saturday, and Sunday while Mom gets Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and each of them takes every other Thursday. If that sounds confusing to you, join the club. When Dad was still at the El Cosmico, we didn’t have much of a schedule, but I guess him moving into an actual house made things feel more real.

He nods. “Right, right.”

The thought of my dad, sitting here just two houses over eating dinner and watching Jeopardy! by himself while Mom and I are together is the kind of thing that stings. It reminds me that, despite my two matching bedrooms and the short walk between my parents’ houses, they are divorced. D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D. No matter how pretty or normal they try to make it feel.

I still can’t help but think they could have stuck it out. There had to be a better way.

Dad shakes out the paper and clears his throat. “‘Dear Miss Flora Mae, my son is getting married to a big-city girl who’s a little full of herself. She’s a lawyer in Dallas and has got it in her head that no one will come out to her wedding if she has it out here in Valentine. How do I convince them that the West Texas landscape is the perfect backdrop for their dream wedding instead of that godforsaken concrete jungle known as Dallas? Yours truly, Mom on a Mission.’”

I squint, wiggling in my chair as I concentrate. Of all our family traditions, this is one of my favorites. Dad would read us Miss Flora Mae’s advice column over breakfast while me and Mom took turns answering the letter aloud. Sometimes our answers were spot-on with Miss Flora Mae’s, and other times, we were just as stumped as the person who’d written in. Mom’s advice was always a little too perfect. The kind of stuff that sounds easy but is hard to actually do. My style was a little more down-to-earth. Nobody’s perfect. What’s the use in pretending?