She panicked—her mother had driven it off. Then the panic coalesced into cold, hard fear—her mother had abandoned her.

She ran into the house with knees like jelly. “Mira! . . . Mira?” Her legs gave out in the hallway and she found herself crawling on her arms to the bedrooms, panting and breathless, on the verge of tears. “Mee-rah!”

A heart-stopping shuffle of slippered feet, emerging from the kitchen.

“Baby, what is matter?” Mrs. Park was in her housedress beating eggs in a bowl. “Why shouting? Mira still in school. Be back later.”

“Oh.” Rosemary was relieved and disappointed to see her mother. Her legs came back. “What happened to the car?”

“Quellie Soo help me to sell it.”

“What?” She pulled herself off the floor. “Why didn’t you ask me first? I’m starting Driver’s Ed next week!”

“No worry—you can study the driving in Korea.”

The blood rushed to her head. She wanted to fling a chair at the alien woman standing in the doorway, the one who claimed to be her mother but was in fact so persistently foreign, so persistently unloving, so persistently strange. Hot tears of rage flushed down her cheeks; she was equally furious that she had failed to hold them back.

“You fucking insensitive bitch!”

With those words came the bite of instant regret. She kicked the wall.

Mrs. Park eyed her daughter calmly. “No shouting today. Today is my birthday. Don’t tell me you forget.” She returned to the kitchen, and checked on the fetid pot bubbling on the stove.

The dining table was covered with traditional Korean dishes. Small plates of boiled mung beans, pickled cabbage, tiny fried fish, tofu squares. Larger plates of omelet with pickled root vegetables, dumplings filled with green mush and mystery meat. Bowls of goopy buckwheat noodles in a cold, grey, sour broth. The spread managed the feat of seeming at once grand and hopelessly bleak.

“I don’t eat taupe-colored food,” said Mira. She prodded the dumplings with her chopsticks.

Mrs. Park chomped away heartily, savoring the flavors of her youth. She was in grandee mode.

“Today, I am forty years old. We eat Korean food.”

The girls said nothing. It wasn’t their birthday.

“Mira, thank you for birthday present.” Mrs. Park held up a plastic wind-up Tweety Bird, the prize in a Happy Meal long gone.

“You’re welcome. The pony will have to wait till next year.”

Another meaningless minute of silence. Mrs. Park turned to her elder daughter.

“You the quiet type, Rosie.” Mrs. Park said it like a vet diagnosing fleas. “In Korea, you study hard, go to college, become doctor.” She concluded with her master stroke: “No need worry about husband.”

Rosemary gritted her teeth and kept quiet until she could take it no longer. “You don’t even know me.”

“How you say this? I am your mother. I know you since you born, baby.”