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intrudes. I try not to count the bobby pins in The Girlfriend’s hair as she nods for me to follow my father. Dad gestures with his chin, then turns sideways up the dark and rickety staircase so he can maneuver my two large suitcases. I grab my backpack and hoist a box containing my books, following my father up.
    The windowless staircase is illuminated by a single antique sconce tossing its anemic light at a bent-over sunflower painted directly onto the wood paneling. At the top of the stairs Dad grunts and yanks my suitcases around a corner and continues down a long hall. I follow. We walk past a screened porch. Two wasps with spindly legs tangle with each other in the opening to the porch, and beyond them, a different cat than the one that had rubbed against me downstairs sits coiled in a yoga pretzel, licking its anus. Ahead of me Dad disappears into a doorway. My bedroom. Or, as The Girlfriend earlier described the accommodation, the spare room .
    Damp air nestles between my throat and lungs. My box of books is heavy. I hip check my way into the room to find Dad thunking my suitcases onto a futon. I carefully settle my box and backpack on the only piece of uninhabited space on the floor.
    “Here it is, Princess,” says Dad. “Welcome home.”
    The room is cluttered. Wool frizzes out of wooden crates, and baskets overflow with magazines. A partially dismantled weaving loom is wedged into a corner. A heavy coat of filth, patterned with the halfhearted swipes of a lazy duster, layers most surfaces. The only window, one of those ancient, double-hung types, holds a pane of yellowed and cracked glass; it’s held partway open by a chunk of wood.
    I can’t help it. I blurt, “She’s not much of a housekeeper, is she?”
    Dad grins. “True. She uses her energy in other ways, though. Ways that I think will help you learn that there’s more to life than shiny surfaces.”
    The couple of family therapy sessions where we talked about desensitization recommended gradual exposure to dirt. Ha! I watch the slight breeze coming in the window crack play with the strands of a cobweb near the ceiling. This feels like sink or swim in the deep end. The antibacterial surfaces of the Conrad are gone forever, and Mom is on a plane bound for her next chapter, and between now and six months from now my father’s girlfriend will be trying to get me to drink African tea and eat vegan soy hemp burgers, and I can’t help it, the feeling just comes out my nose in a giant sneeze, like it does, and then the sobs start up.
    “Princess!” says Dad, his eyes exploding in surprise, his arms trying to reach around me from the other side of the floor clump of books and backpack.
    The top half of me leans into his chest, smelling the weedy odor of him, his five o’clock shadow against my scalp and my growing-in hair. Dad is the only person I can touch without feeling nauseated. Without conjuring up images like the recent one on the porch: a cat licking feces from itself. But still, I feel like a complete baby. A loser. I hate anyone seeing me cry. Especially Dad. It’s even worse knowing that I’d let him down. He wants so badly for me to love this hellhole. He wishes he had a daughter who would sidle up to his farm girl and be instant best friends. A daughter who would slap on coveralls and hip boots and skip along behind him to milk goats and slop pigs and dig up fresh radishes for dinner.
    The sobs come in bursts, like episodes of diarrhea the binge-purge girls at Providence gleefully reported; they happily recounted emptying themselves after porking out on nachos or ice cream, and I could hear in their voices the mixture of shame and relief. I push my cheek deeper into Dad’s chest and feel the organic cotton of his T-shirt soak up the leak from my eye.
    “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay, Liz,” Dad soothes.
    My eyes and forehead are doing that post-sob puff-up. The telltale sign of someone out of control. But it feels so good to hug