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always
my
job to do everything? When did I sign up to be mother of the world? That’s what I want to know.”
    “I didn’t ask for a kidney,” Leta mumbled, fighting back tears. She reached into the fridge and quickly grabbed a Coke.
    “I heard that. And you know you can’t have Coke with your ulcer. If you think I’m going to pay for another barium swallow,
     you’ve got another thing coming, young lady.”
    Leta slammed the Coke onto the refrigerator’s top shelf. Her mother whipped around, pointing the bag of peas at her. It sagged
     like one of those melting guns in a cartoon. “Break that refrigerator and just see what happens.”
    Leta rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to break the stupid refrigerator.”
    “You bet you won’t,” her mother said. “It’s five o’clock. Drink your Maalox.”
    “Fine!” Leta took the Maalox bottle out of the cabinet above the sink. She swallowed down the white, chalky spoonful of medicine,
     trying not to gag. Three times a day, she had to drink the stuff, letting it coat her insides with a protective film.
    In the back of the house, Stevie was shouting at the TV. Leta’s mom flinched. “Go see what he needs, please.”
    “You do it. He’s not my kid,” Leta shouted, running for the front yard where she stood panting, trapped on all sides. Next
     door, their neighbor Mrs. Jaworski clipped at her roses with short, hard snips. Mrs. Jaworski was seventy-five and wore a
     flowered housedress and frosted orange lipstick outside the lines of her lips like a clown. She hated kids in general, teenagers
     specifically, and Leta in particular. As Leta tried to sneak back in without being noticed, she was caught by the tinny sound
     of Mrs. Jaworski’s voice. “You kids better stop throwing your Coke cans in my yard, young lady.”
    “Sorry?” Leta answered.
    “You’d better be sorry. I found three of them in my yard just this morning. Look!” With her snippers, she pointed to the grass
     where three crushed soda cans had been carefully laid out like the dead. She’d actually posed them. It was unreal.
    “Those aren’t mine,” Leta said.
    “I’ll tell your father!”
    “My dad’s not here,” Leta answered back, but Mrs. Jaworski wasn’t listening.
    Leta crept around the house to the back bedroom, which had been her father’s old study, and let herself in quietly through
     the window. She never came in here, really, and now, her mom’s decoupage supplies took up half of the room. Leta’s dad had
     moved to Hartford, Connecticut, four months ago when his company relocated, but they’d stayed behind because her parents said
     the housing market was in a slump. “No sense selling until we know for sure whether this job is going to be permanent,” her
     dad had explained as they sat at a table in Luby’s Cafeteria in the mall while her mother ignored her beef Stroganoff and
     kept a hand pressed to her mouth like a dam. When she finally spoke, she only said, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,
     Leta,” but she looked at Leta’s dad when she said it, and the next week, he was living in Hartford, and Leta was helping her
     mom with Stevie.
    At first, Leta had really missed her dad. But now sometimes she forgot he existed. When that happened, when she’d remember
     him as an afterthought while blow-drying her hair or finding a pair of his slippers in the laundry room, she’d be hit by a
     wave of guilt. She knew she should miss him more, but she didn’t, and now that he was gone, she began to realize that he’d
     never really been around much. Even her fuzziest memories were of her dad hunched over the newspaper at breakfast or sitting
     in his study at night “crunching numbers.” In these grainy memory slide shows, she saw him walking to his car in the mornings,
     coming home for dinner at night an hour after Leta, Stevie, and her mom had eaten. Later, on his way to the back of the house,
     he’d appear in her doorway like an