“I know. It’s only a studio. But doesn’t that make it even more romantic?” She sighs, leans back in her chair, and pats her helmet of hair. She’s in the kitchen at home, sitting at the scratched-up laminate island. “He wants me to move in just as soon as possible because he says being apart from me is hard, which is sweet. And he says it’s about time I get out of this dump.” She waves her hand around at the old wooden cabinets and the intricate flower stencils she painstakingly painted around the top of the walls when I was little. She didn’t always think it was a dump. “The girls say I shouldn’t be rattling around here all alone, empty nesting since you left me,” she says. “Summer on the beach sounds much better.” She stops to take a long sip of her wine.

My first, immediate thought is that it’ll be a summer with no place for me to go home to if I can’t make Angles work. And who is this Clive guy, anyway? I don’t even know where he came from. But she always tells me to trust her, so I don’t want to let on I have misgivings.

“I think he’s going to propose soon too,” she confides, leaning closer. “I think he wanted to say something else at dinner.” I hope my face says “supportive,” not “alarmed.” Her shoulders are white-lady pink-tan and freckled and too bony. She’s on another diet, a strict one it looks like, and it worries me.

I clear my throat, coughing back things I want to say. She can get so upset when she thinks I don’t understand, or thinks I don’t support her.

“Wow” is what I come up with.

“Don’t worry; he won’t make you call him Daddy!” She laughs at her own joke.

“Ew, Mom,” I say, cringing.

“I know, I know!” She puts her hands up. “Just a joke. You know how I am.”

“So wait, you’re moving soon?” I push around the magnets on the bulletin board above my desk, forming them into a smiley face. Someone, probably Taylor, has put together a poem from the magnetic poetry kit on top of my semester-schedule printout: Flat dogs beef in sky / dance your but off / donuts ask why. Also on the board, that picture of Mohadesa Rabei.

“Well, if you hadn’t stolen all the suitcases, I could have,” she says, shaking her finger at me playfully. “You know I can’t afford to buy new ones right now.”

“It sounds like he’ll buy you all the suitcases you want, Mom.”

“It’s true!” she says, and then hesitates. “You’re happy for me, Addie?”

I want her to be happy.

“It sounds like you like him,” I say to her.

“Of course I do,” she says. “He says he’s never met anyone like me.”