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making the bottom of her face look a little like a marionette’s. But today she has drawn fat lips onto her flat mouth, a crimson butterfly.
    “You’re here,” she says. “Hungry?”

Bedtime for An-jay
    I am taking a bite of my chicken teriyaki when I hear Grandma whispering to Aunt Janet in the corner of the kitchen. “Where did she go?”
    “Something about the bank.”
    “Good, good.”
    Grandma’s voice is strange, like she’s an FBI agent.
    I hear the front door open and shut and expect to feel the frenetic birdlike energy of my mother. Instead, it is the graceful movement of Gramps. He comes from behind and squeezes my shoulders. “An-jay, you’re still skin and bones.”
    I laugh when I hear Gramps’s voice. I’m actually not that skinny compared to the stick girls at school, but I don’t correct him.
    “You smell like flowers,” I say. I swish some chicken in the sauce at the bottom of the Styrofoam container.
    “So what’s going on? Your mom causing havoc as usual?” Gramps has permanent lines on his forehead, only made deeper when he smiles.
    “She’s not here.”
    “She’s not?”
    Gramps then disappears through the swinging doors of the kitchen. Those doors remind me of an old-time Western saloon in the cowboy movies Gramps likes to watch.
     
    Mom reappears about thirty minutes later. After hugging Gramps, she sits with Grandma at the dining room table, papers in hand. It’s odd for them to get along so well, and I’m suspicious.
    Aunt Janet escapes to the 1001-cranes room while Gramps and I sit in the overstuffed living room, watching a rerun of a TV crime show and sucking on Funyuns, fake onion rings from a bag. Before the cops arrive on the scene, Gramps is fast asleep.
    During the quiet parts of the show, I hear Grandma talking to Mom. “Get a lawyer,” she says.
    “I am a lawyer.”
    “You know what I’m saying. Get one who specializes.”
    A commercial comes on and I can’t hear Mom’s response.
    They start talking about numbers, bank accounts, and withdrawals. I think I hear Mom cursing Dad a few times. Later on, they begin talking about me.
    “She’s still doing well in English—I mean, she’s always doing well in English. But she almost failed math. She used to be good in math. And social studies, too. I’m thinking that it might be her friends.”
    “Don’t worry,” Grandma says. “We’ll straighten her out.”
    I don’t like the words or the tone of their voices. Grandma is talking about me as if I am a crooked hanger or a crumpled-up piece of paper. And what is Mom saying?
    She’s the one, after all, who thinks that everything about my grandparents and Aunt Janet is old and stale. Janet is still best friends with her best friends from high school, Mom says, laughing. It’s only a matter of time before grocery stores and big warehouse stores kill my Gramps’s flower business. Dead-end business, my mother says. Dead-end lives.
    But in spite of what she says and thinks, she is still going to leave me here with Aunt Janet, Grandma, and Gramps. And the 1001 cranes, for better or worse.
    When the TV episode ends and the news comes on, Gramps shifts in his easy chair and finally stands up.
    “Bedtime for An-jay,” he declares, and then retrieves a couple of pillows from the linen closet.
    We open up a sleeping bag, musty and fishy-smelling from a camping trip that was decades ago, but somehow that smell comforts me. The inside lining has rows of elk and rabbits grazing in a forest by a lake. I imagine that the scene is somewhere in northern California, and try to tell myself that Dad has changed his mind and decided not to move out after all. After I tuck myself into the sleeping bag on the floor, Gramps puts up his hand—it’s not even a wave, really—and disappears into the hallway to his bedroom.
    It is almost an hour later when I hear Mom saying good night to Grandma. Mom snaps off the light and then stumbles over to the couch. I stir so that she’ll