I try not to laugh at his quasi-sexual metaphor. His cheeks burn red in a way that makes me want to both pinch and kiss them.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “You say words now before I make an even bigger fool of myself.”

I try to think of something to say as we walk to the car, past the shining chandeliers and back into real life.

“I’m getting surgery on Monday.”

“So Piper tells me. Which hospital? I’ll come see you.”

“No, don’t!” I say quickly. The last thing I want is for him to see me wrapped in gauze like a half human.

Asad opens the car door for me, taking my hand again as he helps me in.

“I was different before, you know,” I say before he closes it. “A normal girl who had both her ears and all her fingers and toes in the right places. You would have liked her.”

Standing in the open door, he smiles, the glow of the streetlights shining from his eyes.

“I do.”

36

Two days later, on the morning of surgery, I get up early, too ramped up to sleep. Glenn is already outside, his cowboy boots deep in dirt as he mulches a row of tulips. The earthy smell triggers a memory of Mom and me planting bulbs in front of our house, our fingers and knees caked with earth.

“Your mom sure loved the spring.” Glenn reaches down to dust off a sunset-orange tulip. “As a kid, she thought it was magic how the flowers would shoot up as soon as the snow was gone. She’d forget they’d been under there working like the dickens all winter, growing toward the light.”

He shades his eyes with his hand as he looks east toward the mountains, where green spreads beneath the shrinking snowcap like the mountain is waging a civil war with itself over what season it is. “Although as long as there’s snow on those peaks, winter still has a few tricks up her sleeve.”

He clips the bright tulip at the base, handing it to me.

“Check on your aunt Cora for me?” he says. “Make sure she doesn’t pack the whole house in that bag of hers.”

I find Cora in her room trying to jam a pair of slippers into a too-full suitcase.

I sit on the bed next to her, eyeing a pile of shoeboxes wrapped in brown shipping paper just inside her open closet door. Each one has an address penned in Cora’s curly handwriting, and even though she’s tried to hide them from me, I know exactly what’s in each box. I imagine the hours she spent carefully wrapping and addressing each doll. I picture her dropping them into a package bin at the post office, shipping off little pieces of Sara. She probably sneaks them out while I’m at school so I won’t feel guilty.