“If you play with them too much, they won’t turn out,” I pointed out to him.

“It’s good advice. I’m the one who always says that.” Dad beat the half-cooked eggs furiously. “Maybe I ought to start over?”

“Taste the same either way,” I said. “This woman…is she someone Cheryl and Morty set you up with?”

“No,” Dad said.

“Were you even out with Cheryl and Morty last night?”

“Not exactly.”

I raised my eyebrow at him. “Jesus, Dad, were you lying to me?”

I thought about Dad saying he was getting coffee and his strange, secret phone calls. In other words, it wasn’t his first date with the flower woman. He obviously had been seeing her since before my accident. “You’ve been hiding this from me since I got out of the hospital, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”

“It looks bad. I know how it looks, but in my defense, I wanted to break things to you slowly. You had so much to take in with your mom, the divorce, having a sister and everything. I didn’t want to add to your load.”

“But you lied to me! What makes you think I’d even care if you had a girlfriend?”

“She’s not just my girlfriend.”

“What do you mean?”

For the longest time, Dad wouldn’t answer me or look at me. The only sound in the kitchen was the hissing eggs, which were getting good and burned. I hadn’t had much of an appetite for them to begin with.

“I’m getting married, kid,” Dad said. He looked up at me guiltily.

Dad was getting married.

“She’s a dancer. How ’bout that?”

Aside from the flower, I hadn’t gotten much of a look at her in the car. In my head, I pictured the exotic kind. You know, a stripper, probably my age, with DDD breast implants and a fake tan, so I insisted he clarify. “What kind of dancer?”

When he said tango, I was slightly relieved. “She’s traveled the world. She’s won just about every award a professional tango dancer can win.” He sounded the way he did when I’d brought home a particularly good report card. Proud, I guess. “Now she mainly teaches here and in the city.”

He told me they’d met a year ago. He’d had to take dance lessons for an article he had been writing for a men’s magazine. When everyone partnered up, he’d been the odd man out. “She had to take pity on your old man,” he said.

“Do I like her?” I asked.

Dad cleared his throat. “It’s been difficult for you. With Mom. And everything.”

That meant I didn’t like her.

“But maybe your injury could be an inadvertently fortuitous event?” Dad said. “A good thing. A new start.”

A new start? That kind of talk didn’t sound like my dad at all. There was nothing good about what had happened to me. Except maybe meeting James, and that had turned out to be a pleasant but anomalous event that had momentarily distracted me from how much everything else sucked.

“There’s nothing good about this,” I yelled. I grabbed Dad’s keys off the kitchen island and ran out the door and straight into his car, which was parked in the driveway. I didn’t necessarily plan to try driving again; I just wanted to be alone. I couldn’t be in the same physical space with Dad.

Sitting in the driveway, I really wished I could go somewhere. Anywhere.

Dad came out about a minute later. He must have tended to the incinerated eggs first. I pressed the button that locked all the doors, so he couldn’t get in the car.

“Naomi.” His voice was muted through the window. “Please let me in.”

I put my brain-damaged head on the steering wheel. It made the horn beep, but I didn’t mind. I just let it blare. The horn was screaming for me and saying all the curse words that were running through my head. It was so satisfying that I sat like that for a few minutes. I would have let it go on even longer except my head started to throb from the racket.

“Naomi,” Dad said after the noise had stopped.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I yelled.

“This has gone badly. It was a stupid way for me to tell you about my getting married,” Dad’s voice was still tinny and distant through the glass. “And that crap I said about your head injury being a good thing. Of course I don’t think that.”

“Just go away!”

“Please let me in, kid. I feel like an asshole standing out here like this. At least roll down the window a little.”

Dad was trying. He always tried.

Every year for my birthday, my dad gave me a single book. He always put a lot of thought into the selection. It was a big deal to him, because books in general are a very big deal to him. When Dad says he’s going to church, he actually means that he’s going to a library or a bookstore. For my third birthday, he gave me Harold and the Purple Crayon; for my tenth, Holes; for my twelfth, the last birthday I could remember, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He would inscribe the books, too. The messages were long and detailed, sometimes sentimental and usually funny. This was how he talked to me. This was how he told me the important things.

I didn’t unlock the door, but I pressed the button that lowered the window.

“What book did you get me for my sixteenth birthday?” I asked.

“Why are you thinking about that?”

“I don’t know. I just am.”

“Possession by A. S. Byatt.”

I couldn’t remember having read it, which of course didn’t mean that I hadn’t. I asked him why he had chosen that one.

“It’s about a lot of things, but mainly it’s a love story. I was worried that you had gotten a bit, well, cynical with everything that had happened between your mother and me. I wanted to remind you about romance. It was probably a stupid notion. A sixteen-year-old who’s not an expert on romance ought to be brought to a lab and dissected.” Dad laughed. “I was considering Jane Eyre, but I know how you feel about orphan stories.”

“What’s her name again?” I asked finally. Something to do with flowers, or had she just smelled like them?

“Rosa Rivera,” he said.

“Do I call her Rosa?” I asked.

“No, you call her Rosa Rivera. Everyone does.”

“Why?”

“I always assumed it was because of the enticing alliteration of her first and last names.” I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

“What do you call her?”

“My darling, mostly,” he said with tender notes I’d never heard him use before. “Sometimes my love.”

I studied my dad. He was like an alien version of himself. I wondered how long he’d been this way.

When I was back inside, I called Will. He was my only source of reliable information, though I was starting to question how reliable anyone was. Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.

“Did you know my dad was getting married?”

“Of course. In June,” Will answered. “And nice talking to you, too.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

“Well, it’s not exactly your favorite subject. And I assumed your dad would have covered that.”

“Why don’t I like her?” I asked him.

“Basically, you think she’s fake and trying to be your mother,” Will said. “Something along those lines. And you said she smelled funny, like an old lady. One time, she bought your dad a gray fedora for his birthday. You thought it made him look, uh, effeminate, and then you donated it to Goodwill without telling him. To this day, I don’t think he knows what happened to it.”

“I gave away my dad’s hat?” What a weird thing for me to do.

“Well, you really were not fond of that fedora,” Will answered. “Your dad would probably look better in a bowler.”

“Do you like her?” I asked him.

“I’ve only met her once, but she seemed all right. She’s not gonna be my stepmother, though.”

“But my dad…” It was hard to talk about Dad this way. “He really loves her, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, Chief, I suspect he does.”

On Wednesday, Dad suggested we go to Rosa Rivera’s house in Pleasantville for dinner. Since our meeting (reunion?) seemed unavoidable, I agreed. Besides, I was grounded anyway.

When she answered the door, the first thing I noticed was that she definitely looked older than Dad. She had her black hair in a tight bun and was wearing her work clothes, which consisted of black tights, a black leotard, a black shawl tied around her waist, and high-heeled shoes. Pretty much everything she wore was black except for her lipstick and the rose tucked behind her ear, which were both a dramatic crimson. Dancing had given her really excellent posture. I stood up straighter just looking at her.

She greeted me before she even greeted Dad. “Naomi,” she said, throwing her arms around me and kissing me on both cheeks. “How are you, my baby?” She didn’t have much of an accent, but all her y’s came out sounding like j’s—How are joo?

I thought about the question. “Cold,” I said finally.

“Come inside, and I will try to warm you up.”

Her place was the opposite of Dad’s house. It was bursting with color, almost as if she had been given a mandate to use every crayon in the Crayola box at least once: turquoise walls, a fuchsia velvet sofa, a golden chandelier with midnight blue crystals, black-and-white-checkered marble floors, and red roses everywhere.

“Will you live here?” I asked Dad.

“It hasn’t all been settled yet, but I think she’ll probably move in with us.”

I wondered what Dad’s beige house would look like after they were married.

While Rosa was in the kitchen getting me a cup of tea, I examined the many framed photographs that were scattered about the room. One was of my dad and her. A few were of Rosa Rivera at dancing competitions. She also had three or so pictures of herself pregnant, presumably with the subjects of the bulk of the photos: two girls at many different ages doing the usual sorts of childhood activities.

“Those are her twin daughters, Frida and Georgia,” Dad said. “They’re both in college now.”

“How old is Rosa Rivera anyway?” I whispered to Dad.

“Forty-six,” Rosa Rivera answered as she came into the room with a teapot on a tray. “Your father is my younger man. He is six years my junior.” Yunior. “My first husband was thirty years older than me, so it all works itself out, yes?” Jes.

She set the tray on an enormous lime-green hassock and joined me at the fireplace, where she put her arm around my shoulders. It was just the way she was—always kissing and touching you. My instinct was to move away, but for some reason I didn’t.

With her other hand, she pointed to one of the dance competition photos. “This was my husband. He was also my dance partner for fifteen years.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” she said, blowing a kiss to the photograph.

“You really like pictures of yourself pregnant,” I commented.

“It is true. Some people do not like it, but I loved being pregnant. I would not have minded being pregnant even more than I was, but my job made this difficult.” Yob.

I thought of my mother and how she had never been pregnant with me.

“You are shivering,” Rosa Rivera said to me. She put her hands around mine. “They are like ice!” she said, more to Dad than me.

“She’s been that way since she got out of the hospital,” Dad told her.

Rosa Rivera left the room and came back with a rainbow-striped silk scarf. It must have been twelve feet long. She was able to drape it loosely around my neck five times. It smelled like her.

“Better?” she asked.

“Warmer, at least.”

“It suits you,” she said.

I didn’t think so, but whatever.

“You will take it when you leave.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. It must have been really expensive. I didn’t want her damn scarf anyway.

Rosa Rivera shrugged her super-straight shoulders. “I give everything away. I believe, Naomi, that your possessions possess you, do you know?”

I wasn’t sure.

Dad went into the kitchen to make the salad, leaving Rosa Rivera and me alone.

I looked at her and wondered what I hadn’t liked about her before. I decided to ask. “My dad says we don’t get along,” I said.

Rosa Rivera smiled at me conspiratorially. “Possibly. But I am an optimist, and I always believed you would come round.”