Papa sits me down at the kitchen table and says Mama left.

  “Left where?” I say.

  “She just left, Elise.”

  “But where did she go?”

  He doesn’t answer that part.

  I wait for Mama to come home the way she comes home from the grocery store. I wait all through dinner. I wait through my bath and my pajamas and Papa tucking me in, which he does wrong, too loose at the sides. I wait through the whole night.

  She doesn’t come home.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  She doesn’t come home tomorrow either.

  Her things are still everywhere. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Her stuff is in the kitchen. The yellow on my wall is still there. Her smell is in the bathroom. So she has to be coming back. You don’t leave your stuff.

  She forgot her stuff. She’ll come back for it.

  Papa doesn’t know how things work.

  He buys the wrong soap for my arm and it gets red and itchy at the wrist and he looks at it like it’s a math problem he can’t solve. He makes my lunch with the crust on and the fruit is just fruit, not a face. He forgets to put a note in.

  I eat it anyway. I don’t say anything about the note.

  Annie comes over almost every day now. She has a key. She leaves her shoes by the door and a mug in the cupboard that has her name on it that she brought herself.

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  I like Annie. I still like her. She plays with me on the floor and lets me do her hair and brings me things.

  But one afternoon I fall in the garden and scrape my knee on the path and I look up and Annie is on the phone. She reaches toward me without really looking and holds out a tissue.

  “You’re okay,” she says. She keeps talking into the phone.

  I take the tissue. I press it against my knee. I sit on the step.

  I wait.

  Nobody comes.

  The tears come slowly, without any sound. I don’t call for anyone because I already know nobody is going to come out. I sit on the step by myself and hold the tissue against my knee and think about how Mama would already be here. Mama would hear me fall. She’d hear it from inside the house and already be at the door.

  Mama, where are you.

  I don’t say it out loud.

  I fold the tissue in half so the blood doesn’t show and go back inside.

  The bed is wrong at three in the morning.

  I know it’s just air. I know that’s a stupid thing to be affected by. But the air on her side of the bed has changed and I feel it every time I wake up and reach for something that isn’t there.

  Annie stays most nights now. She’s on the other side of me, warm and asleep. I should feel okay. I chose this. I wanted this.

  But Lira’s coffee was always exactly right. The temperature, the timing. I didn’t know she was tracking those things. I didn’t know there was anything to track. It was just coffee that was always ready when I got downstairs and I took it for granted the way you take everything for granted until it’s gone.

  You did this. You know you did this.

  I get up. I get water. I don’t let that thought finish.

  Elise watches me. She does it when she thinks I’m not looking, these careful checking looks, like she’s waiting for me to do something. I don’t know what she wants. I’ve never known what she wants. Lira always knew. I just had to be present, and even that I wasn’t always.

  I should say something to her. Something real. I look at her across the breakfast table sometimes and I open my mouth and what comes out is: “Eat your eggs.”

  She eats her eggs.

  You told her Mama left us. You put your grief inside that word and handed it to a five-year-old.

  She asks me every few days where Mama went. I tell her Mama needed some space. I tell her it’s complicated. I tell her she’ll understand when she’s older.

  She looks at me the same way every time.

  Just tell her the truth.

  I don’t know how.