“You’ve had a lot of junk food already today,” he says flatly.

His mood has changed; he seems stressed out. Maybe he’s mad because I didn’t say I wanted to move to London. But I don’t know what I want. I don’t want to choose. Maybe I said the wrong things, and if I’d said something different . . . something different would be happening. But maybe it has nothing to do with me. His bed is piled with clothes and the floor is covered in open suitcases; it looks a mess.

“But I’m hungry,” I say. I know I sound whiny. I feel whiny, too, like nothing’s going my way.

“Have a piece of fruit.”

“I don’t want a piece of fruit.”

“Have an apple,” he says. In the end we agree that if I have an apple first, I can eat something else, but then I ask him to cut up the apple and Dad gets mad again.

“You’re twelve years old,” he says. “You can use your teeth.”

He closes his bedroom door, not hard but not quietly either, and for a minute I stare at the closed door. I almost say something but don’t. I walk to the kitchen and take an apple from the fruit bowl. Then I flop down on the couch and turn on the TV and start flipping channels.

When Maria has finished the bathroom, she says to me, “I’m going to do your room now, okay?” And she gets the vacuum cleaner from the closet in the hallway, so I turn the sound on louder. Maria comes out and starts vacuuming around the living room, too, moving chairs and lifting carpets. It’s annoying; there’s a baseball game on and I can’t hear the commentators.

“Your father is busy?” she asks me.

“What?” I pretend like I can’t hear her. And she turns off the vacuum cleaner and stands there, with her hands on her apron.

“Your father is busy?”

“I guess.”

Maria has sort of a square wrinkled face and short black hair. She’s a nice woman, but the truth is I always feel a little embarrassed around her. I don’t like having other people in the house.

“Okay,” she says eventually. “If you’re watching TV, I can do the kitchen first.”

By the time Dad comes out, about a half hour later, I’ve turned down the volume again and feel better. The Mets are leading the Astros 5 to 1.

“Throw your core away,” he says, looking at the apple core, which I’ve left on the sofa arm.

“Maria can throw it away. She’s cleaning up anyway.”

“That’s not what we pay her for, to clean up after you.”

“What do we pay her for, then?” I ask.

Dad looks at me, in a way that makes me blush later that night, when I lie in bed and can’t sleep. “You don’t pay her for anything,” he says.

So I push myself off the sofa and pick up the wet core and carry it into the kitchen.