It is ten o'clock and still my mother and Mike O'Donnell aren't here. It's so dark outside. My cat, Fandango, hops up on my lap and with my fingers I separate the colors of her fur; orange, black, white, gray. We sit on the mushy chair in the living room, looking out the picture window at the car headlights that drive down Jenkins Road, waiting for one of them to turn into the driveway, for my mother and this man she likes to come home, but none do and pretty soon I fall asleep just like Fandango. My head slumps forward, so that when I wake up my neck will ache and have a crick.

"Honey, wake up, Mike's here."

Someone touches my shoulder, and my head jerks up and my eyes open, but everything is blurry like my eyes are still asleep and can't remember how to focus even though my brain is alert and ready for action. I can make out the shape of my mother's head in front of me and I smell her breath, boozy. I don't know what kind of alcohol it is, but it stinks like when Sam Quinn brought that bottle of vermouth to Blackwoods Campground at Acadia National Park on our eighth grade trip. I don't think it's vermouth. The only things I've ever seen my mother drink are Black Russians, and only then on Christmas and New Year's.

There's this tall, tall man beside her and I say, "Mr. Wayne?"

She laughs, and all her smelly booze breath smashes into my face and makes me cough.

Back when I was in third grade, my stepdad converted my sister's old bedroom, which was a garage before that, into a family room. He put big barn beams on the ceiling and painted the shingles on one wall red, and then he put in a Franklin stove and a bar that runs across the south wall. The bar has all kinds of bottles behind it. Thirty or so. Maybe thirty, and my mom never touches them. She's just not much of a drinker, so I especially can't imagine her guzzling vermouth.

"Say hello to Mike," she says, pulling her head away from mine. I gulp to get fresh air. "Mike, this is Liliana."

"Pleased to meet you, little lady," he says and sticks out his hand for me to shake. I grab it and it is cold and dry, like holding Italian bread that's been cooked too long, flaky.

"Hi," I say and roll my head away.

I can't believe I thought he was you when he came in. I had just been dreaming that we were out roping steers on the range and there were these convicts who were about to shoot you dead, right through the heart, but I flung myself off my stallion and grabbed your waist, pulling you down just in time. Then I had my rifle, aimed and cocked, ready, and you pulled me behind a rock and said, "Thank you, little lady."

Then they came home. I wish I could go back to my dream. I like dreams.

"A real beauty just like her mother," this Mike O'Donnell man says, eyeing me. I curl my lip.

"She's still half asleep," my mom whispers, and smiles like I'm a cute little dog.

"She should get to bed," he says, "not sleep here on a chair."

"I was waiting for you," I say and look at Mike O'Donnell's face, now that my eyes are focusing. I have to look up high.

This man she brings home is tall, Mr. Wayne, way more than a foot taller than my mom, which means he's about six three, almost as tall as you.

I rub my neck, which aches from sleeping wrong, and continue. "I'm glad you got in safe."

"We stopped at the Back Room. That's why we're a little late and we saw lots of people there, which held us up of course and they didn't have the fastest service tonight," my mom says, kissing me on the head as I get out of the chair. She explains too much. She always does if she's had anything to drink. Her talk gets all yappy and chatty like one of those little dogs, the kind that wear rhinestone collars and tiny sweaters and love to bite. I'm glad she doesn't drink much. I guess she can be the diminutive doggy now.

I shrug. "I need to go to bed."

"Good idea," Mike O'Donnell says, his voice all mosey. "Get your beauty sleep so one day you can be as pretty as your mom here."

"Uh-huh," I say while my mom blushes.

She actually says, "Oh, Mike."

She puts her hand on his arm, all flirty, just like Nicole does when she likes someone. Nicole says body language can tell you a lot, like if you sit next to a guy and your legs touch and it feels hot where your legs touch, that means he's attracted to you. I try not to think about my mother's leg touching Mike O'Donnell's.

Mike O'Donnell actually bends down to kiss me too, touches his lips to my hair. I turn my head down to look at the floor so he doesn't get my cheek. His booze breath reeks, but it has this gum smell over it, like he's trying to pretend it doesn't smell, like his breath is cinnaminty clean and he's not totally roostered. His eyes are the bluest I've ever seen, bluer than my father's, and they have a yellow tint to them like the booze has got him full as a tick and the gin is trying to find a way to leak out. His eyes look like my mother's eyes when she cries. He wears a suit. Why would he wear a suit? He wore a suit on a plane, like some businessman. Or is it for the date he had with my mother? No one wears a suit to the Back Room.

I am too tired to think about it. In my room, I shut the door and put my nightgown on.

Tonight I will not brush my teeth. I flop into bed and reach over to set my alarm. It is 2:19 a.m. My mother's never been home this late. What time did she say they'd get here? Nine? Ten? I am too exhausted to remember.

I stare at the ceiling for a long time. I close my eyes. I hear them giggling in the living room. I hear his voice forget to be quiet once in a while and boom out sentences or phrases while my mother says sweetly, "Hush. Mike, please. Liliana's sleeping."

But I'm not sleeping. I'm closing my eyes and listening to my mother giggle, waiting for them to go to sleep. He will be sleeping right next to my room. I hear footsteps, hushed guffaws, a few all-out donkey-snort laughs, the kind you make when you laugh while you're eating and snarf out all your food, and then I hear one door close. I wait for the other. Nothing. Figures.

Snuggling onto my side, I push my head into my pillow, a fluffy pillow. I hate flat pillows, can't stand sleeping on them at Nicole's house. Has Mike O'Donnell brought his own pillow? Does he have a preference?

I'm about to sleep. I feel that wasteland quality come over me, like I'm being shrouded or walking in a heavy fog or have taken cold medicine, but I jerk awake. I hear something. Not a giggle. Not a sentence or a phrase. A moan.

A moan.

A ghost?

No, it's a human moan. His moan. Deep and low. Not my mother's. And in my mother's room, behind my closet, her bed squeaks. One squeak. Another. Another. A moan. My mother's moan now. Oh my God.

You know, it isn't like I think my mother is a virgin or anything. I'm not that stupid. Not like Katie Henderson who thought that her mother got pregnant by sitting on the toilet after her father went pee. She believed that until eighth grade when we finally had health class and a unit on reproduction. I, however, know my mother has had sex. I am here, right? And she had sex with my stepfather too. Of course she did. But, this guy? I don't like this guy. I don't even know him, just his name and his height and his breath.

She did this once before. Right after my stepfather died. His brother had come up from California for the reunion that was at his sister Shirleen's house. His brother stayed in our brown guest bedroom, too. He actually slept in there. But, a week after my dad died, after the funeral and everything, we went up to Lake Winnipesaukee to spend one last weekend on the boat before we sold it.

My mom said we had to sell it after my stepfather died. She couldn't drive it. I could. I could even get it into the slip without bumping anything, smooth like a car moves into a parking space. She didn't care. She didn't trust me to do things, Mr. Wayne. Didn't think I had the constitution to handle anything like a boat or a bad man or a death. Thought I was just a goddamn little kid, that's all. Just a kid.

The night of Uncle Mark, I went to bed like at nine or so, in the back berth. My mom was supposed to sleep in the bow and Uncle Mark in the middle where the table converted into a bed, but they didn't do that. They had all this tequila and talked about my dad and came back in drunker than a Labrador retriever who's found a keg of beer instead of his water bowl. They were loud, too. They woke me up because they were so loud. My mother is never loud. She is a quiet woman, a woman of soft sounds.

I moved my face from the pillow and saw them kissing, really kissing, the long romantic kind I'd only seen before on The Hills reruns, laying in the bow bed, tumbling around and rolling over kind of kissing, and neither of them had a shirt on.

I was a little kid then, Mr. Wayne, eleven or something, and I didn't think much before I did things, kind of like a baby shoves dirt in its mouth and doesn't think of the consequences, all the grit that will stick between his teeth and scrape across his gums, kind of like that. So like an absolute imbecile, when I saw them searching for each others' tonsils I stood up and yelled at my mother, "How could you? How could you? I hate you!"

My mother sat up. My mother's mouth gaped open. Uncle Mark smiled real slow like he thought everything was a damn good joke. She struggled to put her bra back on.

"I hate you!"

It was all I knew to yell. All I could think. That and "Daddy," which is what I called my stepfather. He didn't mind that I called him that. He just was a Daddy, not a Stepfather or James.

"Daddy!" I yelled it like a stupid fool. I yelled it even though I knew he was dead. I saw him dead. I yelled it because I needed someone to help me. I yelled it because I didn't know what else to do.

But guess what? He wasn't there in the dark boat. He was in the ground in a coffin with the teddy bear I gave him and a video of Stagecoach, one of your movies that he loved.

I just kept screaming like movie Indians running into battle on mustangs, hoofs pounding, eyes pained, throats quivering with rage and pain and blood.

My mother's breast wasn't adjusted right in her bra and all her white skin just glowed there in the darkness. White like dead skin, it was. White like a man in a coffin.

"How could you?" I yelled. Everything inside of me was cold, just a big black coldness, so sharp it hurt. "I hate you!"

She shoved her shirt on and tried to hold me, but I wouldn't let her, wouldn't let her near, just flung my arms all around in these crazy motions, pushing and windmilling and flailing.

"I'm sorry," she cried, trying to get to me. "I'm sorry."

I scurried away.

Uncle Mark, the mean ol' rip, he didn't even put a shirt on, or say anything, just went out of the boat and took a walk like an extra that's not needed any more.

His footsteps sounded heavy on the wooden dock.

"Keep walking," I thought. "Keep walking.

I wanted him to never come back. I wanted him to walk away forever, but not into a sunset, nothing that romantic. He had made taco salad that night and kept smiling so that even my mother ate it. She never ate spicy food. She said it gave her indigestion. She'd pop a hundred Rolaids after she ate stuffing, and that's not even spicy.

I stopped flailing after she stopped hugging me, stopped shouting too.

She stood there, leaning on the bathroom door, whimpering like a baby, "I'm sorry, honey. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

I let her cry and apologize, but when she tried again to hug me, to get her arms around me and pull me close, I pushed her away. I was done with being suffocated, done with being hugged.

"Leave me alone," I said and lay back down on the plushy berth in the back of the boat.

It's hard to get over a thing like that, I guess. She lay down beside me, so I scooted to the very bottom of the bed beneath the captain's seat where you can't sit up because it's so low. Before my stepdad died, I pretended it was a coffin and I was a vampire waiting to be freed and explore the night. After my stepfather died, I didn't like imagining coffins any more. So I imagined it was a stagecoach like in those movies we watched. It was a stagecoach rocking with the horses' strides heading far away to gold-rush land or something.

I just stayed there below her feet, staring at the fiberglass ceiling six inches away from my face. I listened to her cry the whole night. I didn't let her hold me like when my stepdad died, didn't come up from the small safe place below her feet. This was different.

Inside me there was just this big aching canyon where my heart should be and her sorrys fell in there, into the darkness. Just fell and fell.

In the morning we pretended like nothing happened. She made pancakes on the little stove in the boat. I ate them. Uncle Mark, my stepfather's brother, ate them. They were good.

How's that saying go, Mr. Wayne? Another day, another dollar?

Only Americans would say that. It's never ... another day, another hug? Or, I don't know ... another day, another adventure? Nope. Another day, another dollar.

My alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. and Fandango looks at me. We both yawn. Her pointy teeth frame her tiny tongue.

As I put my feet on the carpet I remember that the cast list for South Pacific will be up on the auditorium doors as soon as the first bell sounds.

I don't want to look on the door. I am terrified of looking on that door because I know if I get a lame part or no part, then Sasha and the rest of the world will know that I'm really a loser. Worse, I'll know that I'm really a loser. And it will be doubly awful because Sasha will get a wonderful part and I'll have to have my happiness for her be fuller than my sadness for me. And to make it triply worse I'll have to find out at the beginning of the day and live with knowing all day at school, and I probably won't be able to pay attention at all in any of my classes and forget to take notes, or else take notes so badly that I'll have to ask someone for their notes like you do when you're absent.

It stinks.

No, no it sucks.

Then I remember what sucks even worse.

We have a guest who makes my mother moan the moans. I shudder and put the pillow over my head like some sort of sissified cowboy who's afraid of the damn day.

A real man would have waited a while, wouldn't he? Like you, Mr. Wayne? You wouldn't take advantage. Of course, you'd stay in an actual hotel like normal people do. And you wouldn't be worried about a cast list, because you always get the part.

If Mike O'Donnell weren't here I'd stay home sick. Do a few fake sneezes, run to the fridge before my mother gets up, mix some relish and ketchup and crumble up some Saltine bits and throw them in the toilet to make it look like I've thrown up, put a little on my tongue too, so that I have authentic diseased-person breath.

But Mike O'Donnell is here so I can't stay home sick.

I paddle down the hallway to the bathroom to take my shower. My mother's door is closed. So is the door to the guest bedroom. I guess they are keeping up appearances, I wonder for whose sake.

My mind keeps playing back the photo album, the one with all the newspaper articles in it. The headlines flash in front of my eyes: Man Killed. Man Stabbed. Town Mourns. Police Have No Suspects. Man Killed.

Sometimes I get so scared, Mr. Wayne. Sometimes I am so far from being the cowboy with the hat and the horse and my gun drawn and ready. Sometimes I'm so far away from anything I want to be and it's like that sunset you're always riding to but you never quite reach.

I don't see him this morning. He is sleeping in.

"Jet lag," my mother says, smiling like they've invented a fat-free ice cream that doesn't taste like yogurt or Nutra-Sweet.

"Uh-huh." I grab half an English muffin out of the toaster.

"Did you like Mike?" she asks.

I manage to say, "Sure."

She glares at me. She wants to know. She puts my apple juice in front of me on the table, stands there waiting for an answer. I try not to imagine her naked. I try not to imagine anything.

"I didn't really get to see much of him."

Not like you, I think.

She nods.

I start to tell her about the cast list but she holds up her hand and says, "Do you think Mike likes decaf or regular coffee?"

"Gee, Mom, probably decaf," I say but she doesn't hear that I'm sarcastic, just takes out the decaf and I leave the kitchen to pick out clothes that will make me look good when I cry because I didn't get a part.

Real men don't drink decaf, do they?

Real men don't do a lot of things, like bonking your mother the first night they're here.

Just when I'm ready for Sasha and Olivia to pick me up there's a knock on the kitchen door and my sister bursts in, and my mom rushes over to hug her. I lean against the counter and watch.

"So?" my sister says when they break apart.

My mom giggles like she's six years old. "So what?"

"How did it go? Where is he?" my sister asks, her voice much louder, craning her neck to get a good look around the kitchen like the giant man from Oregon could be hiding in the breadbasket or something.

"He's asleep," my mom says, blushing. She wiggles her eyebrows at my sister.

"Oh, really ..." My sister says, wiggling her eyebrows too. What is with the eyebrow wiggling? Can they not think of something else to do? And when did my sister suddenly get all pronew man?

They laugh like this forever, and then when I can't take it any more I ask, "Brian know you're here?"

The kitchen goes cold and silent, like someone's left the freezer door open for days. The look I get from my mother could turn me into an ice cube.

My sister pours herself some coffee. "I just stopped here on my way to work. He doesn't need to know."

She turns around. I see her eyes. She looks into mine. She looks away first. Caught her. My mom slams her mug on the counter. "You ready for school?"