“You’re back,” my mother says. It is seven o’clock. Morning light streams through the portals of my room, playing rainbow havoc on the window seat. I’ve always liked lying there with a book, feeling the sun on my hand while I turned the pages, growing pleasantly drowsy.
We custom-built this house. We bought the land and found an architect who would help us lay our plans. He gave me a feminine paradise, a walk-in closet with its own window, a cherrywood ladder that led to an upstairs loft.
Steve was the architect’s name, the same as my father. Steve put his skills to bear on that loft, creating and designing it, tweaking its elements, and when things came down to things, I never much used it except for novelty.
“I didn’t ask you to come back,” Nails says. She is fully dressed and sitting on my bed, the same canopy I grew up with, still draped in raspberry-sherbet colors. The bed is made, dust ruffle and everything. She’s been doing bills. Her glasses are pressed up onto the top of her head. There is a calculator by her knee.
I look at her and there is that pleasant mom-feeling: Underneath everything, this is the woman who cried into the void and gave me life.
“Leave,” she says.
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