“Quellie Soo says staging is like making theater,” Mrs. Park said to the girls at dinner, whether they were listening or not. “Realtor is producer, owner is director, children is actor. We make our house the dream of buyer. We stage open house on day after Christmas. Sale can be very fast, Quellie say. Very few houses in California, very many buyer. If buyer ask for one-week escrow, we must say yes, believe you me.”

Rosemary frowned. “So, we could effectively be thrown out of our own house by New Year’s? It’s December seventh! Where will we stay?”

“No worry,” Mrs. Park stated calmly. “I already book airplane ticket.”

Mira backed her chair away from the table noisily and slid off it like a jellyfish.

“Mira, where you go?”

“Leave me alone. I need to pray.”

Her room had been transformed into some deranged Martian’s idea of what a girl’s room should look like, but the makeover had been half-assed. Plastic wrap covered two cheesy framed prints of butterflies to be unveiled at some future occasion, and stuffed animals neglected for a decade were given pride of place on her shelf alongside her books about unsolved murders, UFOs and poltergeists. On Quellie Soo’s genius advice, her mother had hired an old Korean couple to paint the bedroom walls a peachy pink to match the new Martha Stewart Kmart quilt that would grace her bed during the open house. Her old sheets were still on her bed, faded blue Care Bears marching across the mattress, goodwill shooting off their bellies. There was a brown stain from one of her periods that had never washed off, and the way it blotted Daydream Bear’s head made him look like the victim of a maniac’s sledgehammer. She’d always liked that about it.

She retrieved a shoebox from under her bed and took out all the little religious icons she’d been collecting. She mounted them on her night table: a rubber Buddha, a wind-up Moses with a bowlegged stride, a family of genderless Peruvian worry dolls, a garish clay Hindu Ganesha, Rosemary’s Jesus nightlight, the milk-chocolate dreidel her classmate Ruth gave her back in third grade, and a series of laminated prayer cards featuring Catholic saints in action poses, sometimes leaking blood. These cards she cherished the most, and she blew kisses at each one.