When I finally make it through the bright-red front door, I want to collapse on the couch. I want my mom to make me cinnamon toast and pour me a glass of milk and say, “How was your day, Mattie-mouse?”

Instead, even before I take my shoes off, she comes bustling toward me. “When Lucas and Kenny get home, we have to get Kenny to soccer, we need to buy you new shoes, and I need to stop at the library before we make dinner.”

“Can I get some nail polish?”

“Nail polish? Oh, Mattie, are you turning into a teenager now?”

“Never mind,” I say.

“Well, in any case, can you help me with the laundry first?”

“But—”

“Please, Mattie?”

I follow her to the garage, where, strangely, the washer and dryer are. Not in the basement where laundry rooms belong. Houses in California, my mom told me, don’t have basements.

“What happens if there’s a tornado? Where does everyone go?” I had asked.

“There aren’t tornadoes here, Mattie-mouse,” she said brightly.

“Just earthquakes,” I said glumly. “Which you can’t plan for.”

The washer and dryer are pushed against the back wall of the garage. The whole place smells like gasoline and fabric softener and saltwater. There are four overflowing laundry baskets lined up in a row.

“Help me sort the colors.” Back home, when it was just the two of us, laundry had been a one-day, two-basket operation. “Let’s see. We’ll do brights, darks, and whites last.” She bends over Lucas’s basket and pulls out a plastic brontosaurus. She sighs. “Actually, we’ll need more than three loads.”

In the drafty garage, I survey the laundry, the boxes of other people’s memories in the rafters, Bob’s motorcycle under a tarp, Mom’s new minivan. What did Bob do before we came along? I think of Francisco Gómez. Does he do his own laundry? Does he have a wife to help him?

When we’re done sorting, my mom does actually make me cinnamon toast. Which would have tasted even better if she hadn’t also given some to Lucas and Kenny when they got home from school.

After our snack, it’s rush, rush, rush. Kenny to soccer, drive across town and get lost finding the shoe store. Cram my feet into new sneakers. Back across town to the library.

“I have to grab a couple things, Mattie,” my mom says as we walk in. “Can you keep an eye on Lucas?”

I don’t say yes or no.

“I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she adds. The look in her eyes makes my stomach feel funny. My mom and I always did everything together. Now there are huge things we don’t understand about each other. Like how she’s a wife now and a mom to these little boys. And how I’m going to meet my dad on Friday.