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the house and then up another two flights to the second floor.
    “Thanks,” she said, and gave him five dollars instead of the ten she would have given him if he had taken her bags inside.
    Mr. Brown shrugged his shoulders, got back into his van, put it in reverse, and backed out of her life.
    Lola was nosing around, sniffing the lantana and the pittosporum, when a screen door slammed against its frame. Thwack! Beth looked up to see her mother and Aunt Maggie hurrying down the steps to greet her.
    “He-ey!” Aunt Maggie called out in a singsong. “Come on and give your auntie a kiss, you bad girl!”
    “I’m not bad,” she said, and smiled.
    “Yes she is!” Mom said. “Come here, Lola baby!”
    “What about kissing your daughter?” she said.
    “After I scratch my granddog,” she said, gave Beth a slap on her bottom, and scooped up Lola from the grass. “Look at my precious widdle baby!” Lola proceeded to wash Susan’s face, one slurp at a time. “Come see, Maggie! Our Lola’s got your nose and my chin!”
    “Well, look at that! Would y’all look at this little bit of a fur ball? Hey, darlin’.” Aunt Maggie allowed Lola to lick her hand, much like you might kiss the pope’s ring, and then she turned her attention to Beth, narrowing her famous blue eyes. “All right now, missy. Want to tell your aunt what in the world you did to your hair?”
    “I merely enhanced the red.”
    “I’ll say! Whew! Well, hon, it’s just hair, isn’t it?” She sighed so large Beth caught the fragrance of her toothpaste.
    Aunt Maggie, the self-proclaimed matriarch of the family, did not like Beth’s hair. Apparently. Beth did not give a rip what she thought. She was there to do them a favor, not to get a makeover. She was immediately annoyed but hiding it pretty well. She deemed it unwise to arrive and start bickering right away.
    “Don’t you pick on my child,” her mom said to Maggie, and gave Beth a dramatic hug, fingering her ringlets. “I happen to love red hair!”
    Beth took Lola back from her. As usual, her mother had read her mind.
    “Let me help you with the bags, kiddo,” Aunt Maggie said, groaning under the weight of her duffel bag. “Lawsamercy, chile! What you got in here? Bricks?”
    “Books,” she said, “and more books. Sorry. This one’s worse.”
    Everyone took a bag and they grumbled their way up the stairs, across the small back porch, and into the kitchen.
    “Where do y’all want me to sleep?”
    “Take your old room for now, but when we leave you can rotate bedrooms if you want,” Aunt Maggie said. “You must be starving. I made lunch, so why don’t you go wash airplane and dog off your hands and we can eat?”
    Airplane and dog? She was almost twenty-three years old. Did she really need someone to tell her to wash her hands?
    “Sure,” she said, kicked off her flip-flops, and took two of her bags up the steps to her old room that had never really been hers.
    The bedroom where Beth had spent many nights housed her parents’ four-poster bed, which had come into their hands when her grandparents went to their great reward. When her mother and stepfather sold the house on Queen Street and moved in with her Aunt Maggie and Uncle Grant just as they were moving to California, her mother had sold most of their belongings in an undistinguished yard sale and brought only the most important pieces of furniture and some other things with her. Those things that mattered to her and those she thought mattered to Beth, and yes, that was another issue Beth had with her. How could someone else decide what was important to you?
    The big mirror was the first artifact to arrive, followed by an old grandfather clock that chimed when it was in the mood. But the mirror was the thing. The Mirror, the curious and well-used doorway for those no longer of the flesh, was firmly installed in her Aunt Maggie’s living room the week before her mother married Simon Rifkin. So her mother’s exodus back to