The only thing that seemed to be able to quell those nightmares was driving home from Pomona in the dead of night and crawling into Mary-Sue’s bed. The one place in the entire world where she had always felt completely safe was at her mother’s side; how better to steal an extended closeness with her than while she slept? Kate would fall into dreamless sleep next to the snoring, oblivious Mary-Sue and the steady, reassuring clips made by the plastic alarm clock on her nightstand. At first light, she slipped out of bed and took off for school without waking Mary-Sue. Until graduation, this would be the only way she could get any rest on those nights of the flashbacks.

Mary-Sue noticed everything, of course. She’d wake up in the middle of the night to pee and there they were—the warm body in her bed, the car in the driveway, the tampons in the trash. She didn’t say anything because she knew Kate would be on the defensive about it. If she woke in the morning before Kate did, she lay completely still and kept her eyes closed until Kate rose and tiptoed out of the room. Sometimes this tactic made her late for work but she didn’t care. She had to resist the temptation to leave packs of cookies on the breakfast table for Kate to take on her way out. That would break the charade; kindness went against the rules of this game.

As soon as Kate graduated, she moved back home, and Mary-Sue didn’t try to stop her. She didn’t want her to feel unwelcome. Far from being a freeloader, Kate got a job and bought all the groceries and paid all the bills. But Mary-Sue was perplexed when her grown daughter began again to creep into her bed on stormy nights. Perhaps Katie was a late bloomer, too. After all, she’d been in her mid-thirties herself before she did the one right thing in her life: import Kate. Nevertheless, Mary-Sue hoped it would be a matter of months before her daughter got up on her own two feet and moved away. She longed for the sweet sorrow of missing her.

The mid-1990s were an interesting time on Santa Claus Lane. Nervous Alta Vista families fearing the aftershocks of the LA riots moved out to new exurbs built around shopping malls beyond the county line. New people moved in—Latinos, Armenians and Koreatown transplants who wanted nothing to do with the free-floating anger that had permeated many parts of the city. Mary-Sue suddenly became one of the longest-standing residents of the neighborhood, a grande dame. She realized how easy it was to gain currency as an old hand in California; she’d been in her house 15 years but it might as well have been 150. The new people came to her for advice on everything from how to take care of camellias to where to get their cat spayed. With her salt-and-pepper hair and accentless speech, she must have seemed to them positively patrician, and this amused her no end. Kate, however, had no interest in these strangers who kept coming to their door with stupid questions, least of all the Korean pastor who once stared at her funny because she hadn’t worn a bra.