Tanya and I, over the following eight years, never found our rhythm. I want to be fair to Tanya. Tanya is not a bad woman. Tanya is, in many ways, a nice woman. Tanya made an effort at the beginning. She took me to lunch twice in my senior year of high school. She bought me a graduation dress. She came to my college move-in day. What Tanya could not do — and what I am not sure any woman could have done — was understand the specific quality of what it was like to be a teenage girl who had found her mother dead on the kitchen floor seven months before her father started dating. Tanya had treated my grief, over

eight years, with a mix of mild impatience and low-grade competition. She had, slowly, at first by accident and then with what I believe was some intent, begun replacing my mother's presence in the house I had grown up in. My mother's china went into storage. My mother's photographs got rotated to a back hallway. My mother's piano, which had been the centerpiece of our living room for twenty-two years, got sold — I learned from my aunt — in my sophomore year of college, because Tanya "had always hated having a piano in the living room." I did not say anything. I had, by then, the habits of a daughter who kept the peace. My father did not protest. My father, when I asked him, told me "life moves on, honey."