“Why?” I said. “You don’t even like the house.” She was standing right in front of the window now—she could have pressed her nose against it—while I waited, shivering, a few yards back, looking over my shoulder. I imagined her hair growing enormous and sentient, breaking in through the windows and invading every part of this ugly house, filling all the rooms like thick black water before spreading, searching, stuffing itself into every house in the neighborhood, smothering all the occupants and pushing their desiccated bodies out onto their lawns. I imagined my mother’s calm face in the middle of the black mass, her sigh of relief as she filled up every space around her, as she reached farther, farther, farther.

She stepped away from the window. “It’s only a game,” she said. “My mother used to play it with me. We would walk around our neighborhood together, and dream about the lives we might have someday. Every house was my dollhouse. I never had a real one, like you did. I never had a single doll, and you always scream when I try to braid your hair.”

I pointed to a green Victorian at the end of the block.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re my daughter after all.”

Yes, sometimes she was like this: conspiratorial, kind, desirous of my love. Other times, she would storm into my room, push me, slap me, grab an arm in her hot fist, curse me, throw me to the floor. But after a while, I began to be able to predict her moods. They seemed to have something to do with the men who continued to come in and out of our house at night, with the parties she threw nearly every week, with the Fatties, who kept appearing, each one bigger, meaner, and closer to the house than the last. (Poor old Beth was looking slim and benign now. My mother had achieved grand new heights of grotesquerie.) I found I could map her anger, skirt to the edges when necessary. I could often escape this way. Yes, even like this, even though she had become this monstrous, unbridled version of herself, I could plot her. She made sense to me. I was her daughter, after all. That’s why I had to leave.

When Tenzin finally made the meal we’d been waiting for—her “famous” vegetarian chili—I followed Laurel to the kitchen at the beginning of rota. I waited in the doorway as she ducked in to get a bowl, but just as she was handing it over, Tenzin noticed us. “Laurel,” she said. “What are you doing?” She was standing before a sideboard covered with tiny green pots, mixing spices to see which combinations she liked best, and in which proportions.

I stepped forward. “I was wondering,” I said, “if I could bring Luke a bowl of chili.”

“Ha!” she shouted. “Does someone have a little crush on Luke?”