I pull out a chair and sink down into it, then steal another cookie from the rooster jar. I’m stuffing the last bit of it into my mouth when my dad walks in, clutching his phone.

He glances around the empty chairs. “Where’d Micha go?”

I swallow the cookie and brush the crumbs off the table. “Home for a little bit, so you and I could talk about some stuff.”

“Yeah, we do need to talk.” He sits down, then glances at the rooster on the table without the lid on. “I see you found the cookies.”

“Yeah, but who made them?” I wonder curiously. “You?”

He shakes his head as he puts the lid back on. “No, Amanda did.”

“Who’s Amanda?”

“This woman I met while I was staying at the alcoholism treatment center.”

“Was she another recovering alcoholic?” I ask.

“No.” He pushes his sleeves up and rests his arms on the table. “She was the secretary there.”

“Oh,” I say. “So… are you, like, dating her?”

He scratches his head. “Um… sort of… I guess.”

“Oh,” I say, at a loss for words. It’s weird he’s dating because he’s my dad and the only person I’ve seen him with is my mom, but then again their relationship was beyond rocky. “Is she the one who cleaned the house?”

His hand falls from his head to the table. “No, I cleaned it. Why?”

I shrug. “Just wondered. It looks nice.”

He gives me a look, like he wants to say more, but then he changes the subject, relaxing back in the chair. “So what was in the box?” he asks rigidly. “I know it was stuff that belonged to your mother, but what exactly?”

“Mom’s journal and a few other things, like drawings and photos.” I pause at the sudden increase of my heart rate. “I didn’t know she liked to draw.”

He stares down at the table with a sad look on his face. “She did when she was younger,” he says quietly. “But she stopped not too long after we got married.”

It’s so hard to be talking about this aloud, asking him questions, but I force myself to continue because I want to know—understand. “Why did she stop?”

When he glances up, his eyes are little watery. “Because she stopped enjoying it and so there was no point, at least that’s what she told me.”

I trace the patterns of the wood in the table, staring down at them, because I can’t look him in the eye with what I’m about to say. “You told me once, when I was… when I was dropping you off at the recovery clinic, that things weren’t always bad. But when was that? I know her bipolar disorder progressively got worse, but even from the start it always felt like mom was sad all the time.”