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his clothes—well, it didn’t matter. Not back then, anyway. But as she matured, Kira’s eyes grew clearer, and her sympathies tilted toward her mother, who was always bent over the sink or laundry basket, mending and cooking and sweeping. Creating the illusion of a nice home, as if that could help tamp down the turmoil swirling within it.
    “Why do you and Daddy sleep in different rooms?” Kira had asked her mother once.
    “Because he snores,” her mother had responded, and then she’d turned on the vacuum cleaner, which was her favorite way to end conversations.
    Sometimes Kira wondered: Had her parents ever been happy? And if so, who had taken the first steps toward destroying their marriage? Or maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault. They could just have been a mismatch, another young couple who’d mistaken passion for love, and whispered promises for lifelong commitments.
    By the time Kira was near the end of her elementary school years, her mother’s face had seemed creased in a permanent frown, her features sunken inward like a prune. Her dad often came in at dawn, pretending he’d had to work through the night. It was almost comical, given that he was so often between jobs. At least it would have been comical, if it didn’t hurt so much. Because he wasn’t just abandoning Kira’s mother, he was leaving her behind, too.
    His bag of tricks no longer enthralled her, and she was old enough to read her own books. Her father didn’t seem to know what to do with her once she was no longer a little girl and had questions and accusations of her own, so he stopped trying and began to avoid her. His sparkle dust had worn off, revealing the flawed, ordinary man beneath it.
    “Let me guess: You slept at the office, right?” she’d said once when he came in as she was leaving for school, his clothes rumpled, his expression guilty. At that point he was selling men’s suits at a retail store. “It must be so busy , fitting in your nocturnal clients.”
    Nocturnal was a word she’d studied for the school spelling bee she’d won—the one he hadn’t attended.
    One night he and her mother had had an explosive fight—Kira could hear them yelling even after she’d pulled her comforter over her head and plugged her fingers in her ears—and the next day, her father had moved out.
    “I’ll see you soon, K,” he’d said as he carried armloads of trash bags stuffed with his belongings out to his car. He’d tossed her a wink, but she’d just walked past him, down the front steps and onto the sidewalk and into town, where she’d gone to the library and had hidden for hours in the reference section, flipping the pages of a heavy book and watching the words blur. He’d called her that weekend, and the next one, but she’d refused to talk to him, which she knew secretly pleased her mother.
    No matter how tight things became—and they became almost suffocatingly so, after her father left and sent only sporadic checks and they moved from the house to an apartment—her mother wouldn’t accept help. She wouldn’t take anything.
    It wasn’t as if they ever didn’t have enough to eat. It was just that sometimes they ate rice and beans, or peanut butter sandwiches, for a few days running. Kira’s clothes and shoes came from the thrift shop. She didn’t mind wearing other people’s old clothes, but used shoes were the worst. No matter how clean they looked, they always smelled sour. Plenty of people had it worse, though, Kira’s mother always reminded her.
    Kira understood that her mother was proud, but there was a time when Kira’s most fervent wish was for a little charity. She was about eleven years old, and she’d spotted a rack of Hostess cupcakes by the checkout line in the supermarket. Those cupcakes were symphonies of sugar and starch, the most delectable things imaginable.
    Her mother had seen her staring and, miraculously, had plucked a cellophane package from the rack, putting it into their cart