After another endless phone call with his friend Ron, the retired, half-deaf divorce lawyer, Raymond found Mary-Sue at his door, unsolicited, with a store-bought lemon meringue pie. She told him what a good thing she thought he was doing, taking in those poor girls, and then prattled on, her hand on his arm, about how adoption was going to change his life. Platitudes. Once she was gone, the pie went flying into the trash.

Those Koreatown relatives the girls hardly knew—were they worth his sweat? Whenever he felt like throwing in the towel, he reminded himself: should he ever be found lying in a pool of his own vomit, Rosemary would be efficient about calling 911. She was observant, industrious, polite. Should he ever need cheering up, Mira was there. All those spontaneous cartwheels she spun on the supermarket floor, she was his little dust devil, his nonstop whirligig. No, he couldn’t lose that. He’d fight, at least for now.

He had embraced neither girl, worried about smothering them with the pressure to reciprocate. Instead, they shook hands, like comrades. He knew he wouldn’t have trouble with Mira but he remained afraid of Rosemary—she was a mysterious black box of womanly secrets. One overcast evening, he watched her as she poked around her former backyard, digging into the raggedy blue couch and unearthing a stack of papers under one of the soggy seat cushions; he knew what they were at a glance—her dead father’s stories. She ran back to his house clutching them just as the first drops of rain fell.

In front of him, she acted chaste and never discussed any boy, and especially not the tormented Arik Kistorian, who apparently still roamed free—in Florida. Yet he happened upon her more than once on the phone to somebody, her hand inside her pants. He’d heard her sneak people into her room and felt the tremors on the floorboards as her bed shook. He really didn’t want to turn into his old man and leap to judgments, but her silence made him wonder if the fire at the house had been her idea, winding up a gullible, hormonal boy like a high school Lady Macbeth. Hah, now there’s a character for a book.

Raymond had the nagging feeling that he was failing her, even as she persisted in expressing only the politest gratitude. All that girl ever seemed to say was “cool,” “thank you,” and “I love it.” She behaved as if she was biding her time in his house, cleanly, quietly, as if it was some purgatory from which she would flee into her real life, far away. He recognized this behavior from his own youth, but it didn’t pain him any less.