I wiggle loose and hurry to the truck before she erases my mother completely.

“I’ll miss you,” Auntie Minerva calls out to us.

I won’t miss the long prayers said before each meal and bedtime, her dry chicken kelaguen, or the plastic-covered furniture sticking to my legs.

Malesso

Every year the newspaper sponsors a contest and the people vote for the most beautiful village on Guam. The southern villages almost always win and Malesso wins most often.

We have no hotels or big stores or busy intersections. Here purple bougainvilleas grow as tall as trees. Pink and white chain of love vines embrace the flame trees along the road that travels aside a turquoise sea. The bell tower overlooks the ocean and Cocos Island near the horizon. I didn’t see any of this until today.

Today I notice the bougainvilleas, the chain of love vines, the turquoise sea, the bell tower as if discovering them for the first time. Did my mother ever see them?

Home

We arrive at our home—the blue cement house I’ve lived in since the day I was born. Our tiny store, next to our home, looks like a haunted house with boards nailed over the windows.

Tata walks through our front door, where he saw my mother’s ghost. It doesn’t seem to faze him. Maybe Tata practiced coming home after fishing every day. Maybe he took tiny steps, each day walking closer until he could turn the knob. But now I watch how he moves fast through the house with his suitcase and doesn’t even unpack—just heads outside again. He grabs his net and walks across the street toward the ocean.

As he leaves, Tata tells me to flip the sign hanging on the door of our store that said CLOSED for the past six months. That means I’m the one who must wait for customers in the cabana. Who will want six-month-old bread, rotten pickled eggs, and freezer-burned Häagen-Dazs ice cream? I decide to make a list for the vendors.

Tata built the cabana from bamboo and banana plant leaves. A coconut tree bends over it and after Olivia had a close call with a coconut, my father attached a net underneath to catch any falling fruit.

From the picnic table, I watch Tata’s back until his short body could be any of the village men. But when he throws the net, anyone would know it was Tata. Only a fine fisherman throws a net in the air in such a way that it lands on the water in a perfect circle. When he gathers up the net, I rush inside the house to unpack my clothes.

Frank has already unpacked and is heading outside, kong-gi pieces in hand. Olivia plays in the backyard with the dogs. Her bag of clothes is in the middle of the hall.

“Come here, Olivia,” I say. “You need to unpack.”

“You’re not my mother,” she tells me.

I dump her clothes on the floor, thinking, Yes, you’re right. I’m not.