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room, out of my old life. Twenty-one, and I had just lost my father, and yet my mother was pushing me through a rite of passage I didn’t feel ready for, but the renovations had taken place and there was no turning back. “We can’t live in the past,” Ricki told me when I called her at Brown to complain. “Dad is gone and Mom is moving on.”
    Gripping the phone, I had swallowed back tears, reluctant to let Ricki mother me. That was my role, my job. I had stepped in to do the mothering when I’d realized Alice wasn’t cut out for the task. I was the one who’d told my sister the nitty-gritty of sex, the truth about boys, the warnings about over-plucking eyebrows, blue eyeshadow and the girls who wore their popularity like a crown.
    Mothers and daughters, sisters, missing parents . . . relationships were a morass of struggle and complexity. Thinking back to Yoshiko’s situation, I wasn’t quite sure how to separate my subject from her mother’s projections and dreams.
    Sometimes you need to wade through the crap and you can’t find a decent pair of boots.

5
    A therapist once told me I would not get along with men until I resolved the feelings of abandonment and anger that I felt toward my father. I responded that I didn’t feel abandoned, that my father couldn’t help it if he had a heart attack, and that I didn’t really care that Dad was off at digs for long periods during my childhood. Isn’t it okay to love someone and live without them in your life every day?
    My boyfriend Carter didn’t get the concept of healthy separation either. Over the past few days he’d been on the cell twice a day, wanting to come over, wanting to squeeze in a quicky, wanting, wanting, wanting. “What part about ‘Not feeling well’ do you not get?” I’d snapped at him. “Would you look at some hot porn and call me next week?”
    And I had abandonment issues?
    Well, maybe just a few. For starters, there was Philip. I vowed never to forgive my ex-husband for screwing around on me. I mean, cheating is one thing, but when you marry a person it’s supposed to mean something. Ricki thinks I fell into the relationship with Philip to make up for losing Dad. She tells me I was infatuated with Philip, in love with the notion of love and security, two tenants that were threatened when our father died. Sometimes my little sister is too wise for her own good. Of course, I always argue with her, and she gets upset and tells me to be honest. But Ricki doesn’t understand that it’s not that simple. Some of us are unable to look in our souls and see our motivations, the roots of our pain, the reasons for our personal failures. Sometimes those answers are buried so deep inside us, we begin to doubt their existence.
    But pain tests our strength and endurance, and thanks to Philip and Dad and any other guy who’d done me dirt, I was feeling pretty ballsy the next day as my heels clicked over the tile floor of the lobby. Despite equal opportunities and women’s rights, the offices of the Herald are still a bastion of testosterone-laden, Type-A reporters. Perhaps my lack of testosterone was what put me in the obit section of the paper, but I figured I had enough Type-A to drag myself out of the grave beat eventually. In the elevator I flung back my fake-fur-lined coat and glanced down at my black Manolo Blahniks. Power shoes. Few people have the nerve to argue with a girl wearing stiletto Manolos.
    As my heels power-clicked along the floor outside the elevator , I sensed through my headachy lethargy that something was up. Instead of the usual conversation clusters around the TV monitors or the coffee machine, editors huddled in their cubicles, glancing nervously over their shoulders. The doors at the end of the hall were closed. That meant private talks in the offices of the publisher and editor in chief, and in a newsroom, almost nothing is