Hanna stayed at Miss Lorna’s for what felt like forever. But it was really only a few days before Papa returned.

The news was bad. At least fifteen Chinese men had been lynched. Chinese-owned houses and businesses had been ransacked, looted, burned. While Papa stood guard at his shop, Mama had gone to check on her friends. In trying to help them save their noodle shop, she had been overcome by smoke and collapsed.

Papa brought her home. He and Hanna nursed her as best they could, but her lungs were badly damaged. The sounds of her coughing, wheezing, and gasping filled the house every hour, day and night. Each cough made Hanna flinch, imagining the pain her mother was feeling, the constant desperate strain for something as simple as air.

Mama struggled for six years after that. On a cold rainy morning in February, a few months before Hanna’s twelfth birthday, a thick silence woke her. She got out of bed and saw that the door to her parents’ room was ajar. She peeked around the edge of the door.

Mama was lying on a quilt on the floor. She was curled up on her side, and Hanna could see her face, so calm and sweet that she was almost smiling.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in his nightshirt, Papa cleared his throat, then looked up and saw Hanna. “She must have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night,” he said. “She didn’t wake me—I never felt or heard a thing.”

Hanna tiptoed into the room and sat down at the foot of the bed.

“Where your mama came from, a lot of people sleep on the floor,” he said. “Only rich people have beds.”

Hanna’s eyes were watering; she wiped away the tears with the sleeve of her nightgown. “Is that what she was doing, Papa? Sleeping the way she used to?”

“Partly. Maybe. But I think she knew somehow that the end was coming, and she didn’t want . . . She knew that no one likes to sleep in a bed where someone has died.” He shook his head. “Always had to be thinking of someone else. And look where it got her.”

Hanna hoped that the anger in his voice was just his way of sorrowing. She concentrated on looking at Mama’s face. So peaceful. Her last present to me, to know she was at peace when—when the end came. The wave of grief that swept over Hanna receded a little when she realized that the terrible wheezing sounds had stopped at last.

Three weeks later, Papa sold the shop and bought a wagon. They packed up and left to search for a place to live that would be free of Mama’s ghost, the memory of her sickness, her death, and the riot that had eventually killed her.

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