Because he was not one to relay emotions to others in clear sighs and frowns and ‘okays’, Father turns his head towards me and raises the ends of his smile a bit more – like hooks, waiting for me to grab hold. I smile back and recline in the car, with the fumes of hot summer air encompassing me. He strikes out another house with a red circle, and asks if it’s okay if we look at one more house, because it may just be the right one for us this time. I say ‘okay’ and stare out at the roads we’ve wandered down a hundred times. We wait expectantly as we roll up into another driveway, looking for the shine of a clipboard and a feigned ‘may I help you?’

I think of new landscapes on walls and laughing in pools and organizing new drawers that could be my own and not Mother’s; but I fail to notice the ends of Father’s smile gradually drop, as if he realizes that he will never get what he’s been wishing for.

I have tried to spit out words so many times but they can’t get through, they’re the thoughts that don’t line up neatly in a row and refuse to sit down politely and say please and thank you when they need to. They cause a riot in my head and I can’t get them to stop, no matter how many times I drown them to make them stop breathing.The sudden rush – she can’t knock me out. Mama still yells at me to stop crying and stop being silly and why on earth am I crying, can I not sit down and be still for once? I tell her scattered processes of what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling but they seem to get interrupted by that filter they call words and politeness but I can’t stop the sobbing, and she yells at me in her confusion at why can I not stop? I swallow the saltwater so I drown myself and give her someone else, crying that ‘he’s replacing Father,’ and she hugs me and assures me that’s not going to be a problem anymore, like a band-aid over a scar that refuses to disappear. I know that’s what she’s been prepared for, and it’s easier for her to prescribe secondhand comfort than to deal with a mess of tears and love and child.

The yelling stops. The tighter she hugs the more I trace over the excuses I had woven in between my teeth.

I can see him imagine, through the entrails of smoke wavering from the end of his cigarette, the life he wants. I grew out of comfort blankets and being handed ‘tell your mother’ at the age of seven. Mother folds away the blankets and tucks them away behind the shoe cupboard at the bottom of the stairs, as a memoir of what has been (or what should not have been). I walk out the door with another week packed inside my bag. Father folds away the tip of his cigarette into another drink bottle.

'Father and I have been talking' she says. Ma wrings the words out, pacing out each syllable. My questions slowly rise to the surface, but they wash over each other, wave by wave. Mother holds me close, the same way she does when I crawl into her bed when the nightmares get too scary.

'We'll be okay.'

When Mother's steps have stopped echoing from the top of the stairs, Father hands me the latest newspaper clippings, and we sit down.

'What about this house?'

Father has not come home in five years.