Still, there was also was something reassuring about working for Commercial, almost hopeful. Like things that were lost could be found again. As we drove away, I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. Maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.

I’d expected to sleep the same way I had at Poplar House— barely and badly—but instead woke with a start the next morning when Jamie knocked on my door, saying we’d be leaving in an hour. I’d been so out of it that at first I wasn’t even sure where I was. Once I made out the skylight over my head, though, with its little venetian blind, it all came back to me: Cora’s. My near-escape. And now, Perkins Day. Just three days earlier, I’d been managing as best I could at the yellow house, working for Commercial, and going to Jackson. Now, here, everything had changed again. But I was kind of getting used to that now.

When my mom first took off, I didn’t think it was for good. I figured she was just out on one of her escapades, which usually lasted only as long as it took her to run out of money or welcome, a few days at most. The first couple of times she’d done this, I’d been so worried, then overwhelmingly relieved when she returned, peppering her with questions about where she’d been, which irritated her no end. “I just needed some space, okay?” she’d tell me, annoyed, before stalking off to her room to sleep—something that, by the looks of it, she hadn’t done much of during the time she’d been gone.

It took me another couple of her disappearances—each a few days longer than the last—before I realized that this was exactly how I shouldn’t react, making a big deal of it. Instead, I adopted a more blasé attitude, like I hadn’t even really noticed she’d been gone. My mother had always been about independence—hers, mine, and ours. She was a lot of things, but clingy had never been one of them. By taking off, I decided, she was teaching me about taking care of myself. Only a weak person needed someone else around all the time. With every disappearance, she was proving herself stronger; it was up to me, in how I behaved, to do the same.

After two weeks with no word from her, though, I’d finally forced myself to go into her room and look through her stuff. Sure enough, her emergency stash—three hundred bucks in cash, last I’d checked—was gone, as were her saving-bonds certificates, her makeup, and, most telling, her bathing suit and favorite summer robe. Wherever she was headed, it was warm.

I had no idea when she’d really left, since we hadn’t exactly been getting along. We hadn’t exactly not been, either. But that fall, the hands-off approach we’d both cultivated had spilled over from just a few days here and there to all the time. Also, she’d stopped going to work—sleeping when I left for school in the morning, sleeping when I returned and headed out to Commercial, and usually out once I returned after all the deliveries were done—so it wasn’t like we had a lot of chances to talk. Plus, the rare occasions she was home and awake, she wasn’t alone.

Most times, when I saw her boyfriend Warner’s beat-up old Cadillac in the driveway, I’d park and then walk around to my bedroom window, which I kept unlocked, and let myself in that way. It meant I had to brush my teeth with bottled water, and made washing my face out of the question, but these were small prices to pay to avoid Warner, who filled the house with pipe smoke and always seemed to be sweating out whatever he’d drunk the day before. He’d park himself on the couch, beer in hand, his eyes silently following me whenever I did have to cross in front of him. He’d never done anything I could point to specifically, but I believed this was due not to innocence but to lack of opportunity. I did not intend to provide him with one.

My mother, however, loved Warner, or so she said. They’d met at Halloran’s, the small bar just down the street from the yellow house where she went sometimes to drink beer and sing karaoke. Unlike my mother’s other boyfriends, Warner wasn’t the meaty, rough-around-the-edges type. Instead, in his standard outfit of dark pants, cheap shirt, deck shoes, hat with captain’s insignia, he looked like he’d just stepped off a boat, albeit not necessarily a nice one. I wasn’t sure whether he had a nautical past and was pining for it, or was hoping for one still ahead. Either way, he liked to drink and seemed to have some money from somewhere, so for my mom he was perfect.

These days, when I thought about my mom, I sometimes pictured her on the water. Maybe she and Warner had gotten that old Cadillac all the way to Florida, like they’d always talked about doing, and were now on the deck of some boat, bobbing on the open sea. This was at least a prettier picture than the one I actually suspected, the little bit of denial I allowed myself. It wasn’t like I had a lot of time for fantasies anyway.

When she left, it was mid-August, and I still had nine months before I turned eighteen and could live alone legally. I knew I had a challenge ahead of me. But I was a smart girl, and I thought I could handle it. My plan was to keep the job at Commercial until Robert, the owner, caught on to my mom’s absence, at which point I’d have to find something else. As far as the bills went, because our names were identical I could access my mom’s account for whatever paychecks—which were direct-deposited—I was able to earn. I figured I was good, at least for the time being. As long as I kept out of trouble at school, the one thing that I knew for sure would blow my cover, no one had to know anything was different.