“Look,” your mother says, gesturing at her side of the window. You obey because that’s what you do, be a good girl and do as you’re told. Today, all you see is some bored cows lazing in the pastures a little farther down the road. “This could be our next home.”

You’ve long passed the point of questioning, of keeping a record of times and places. Craig David sounds about right in not telling apart the past from the present. Your father, too, told you when he was still sober enough to preach the mysterious workings of the universe that Time was just a construct, a mere smokescreen for all our insecurities as human beings. All you did back then was nod, not because you understood him or anything but because that’s what you do, be a good girl and do as you’re told.

David leaves its place to Cher by the time you reach a backwater Tucson suburb. You know you’re not supposed to curse on a Thanksgiving but that’s all you’ve heard since your mom had that phone call with her sister a few days earlier. After she hung up, she turned to you and called this place “the asshole of civilization,” though in hushed tones, as if her sister could still hear her.

Past a water tower, your mother turns the car down a gravel road and drives until the song runs itself out. The woman you remember as your aunt waves at you from the mouth of the driveway, her face broken into a Bette Davis smile, which gets wider and creepier up close, unlike your mother’s trademark frown. There’s an older man standing by her side, hands in his pockets, squinting in your direction as if to figure out where he remembers y’all from.

Your life in the new house starts off somewhat all right. Unlike those seedy hotels you’ve dwelled for the better part of last year, you’re given a fresh cup of orange juice in the mornings and a pill to mitigate your sleep at night. You’re spared the second bedroom down the hallway, sandwiched between your aunt’s nocturnal moans and the collective chirrups of crickets. You don’t say anything about the sounds because that’s what you do, be a good girl and do as you’re told.

Like all the other times, your mother adjusts to this new reality of your life much quicker than you do. Her communication with her sister has improved by a civilized degree, her manners around others grow tamed and courtly. She works like a bee sporing her way through everything that would justify her presence at this unwelcome home, a cougar ready to flee when necessary. Like your friends at school, you thought you wanted to be like Mel C from Spice Girls when you were younger, but these days you realize that you just wanted to be a different version of your mother.

You catch your aunt’s husband staring at you at odd times. His gaze is there even when you’re not looking, following you everywhere from your room to the depths of the woods. You consider bringing it up to your mother but know better than to push it. You hold onto your old Spiceworld cassette more and more each day. Your father recorded it off the radio for you as a sign of his undying love and affection. You smile bitterly at the irony of his dying shortly after. You realize there isn’t any lasting sign of love between your aunt and her husband in the house. No babies, no dogs, not even a single houseplant. The whole house just looks like a dense collection of concrete and bones.

One day, you’re tending the grove of lilies to the north when your aunt’s husband shows up with a plastic jug of water in his hands. Like all aging mammals, he’s showing signs of temper when you refuse his help. Once or twice you caught him ogling your mother with a similar intensity in his eyes, the same pair that’s now sizing you up and down in the garden. The citrusy residues of lilies merge with the woody overtones of his cologne and burn your nostrils as he comes near you and holds you by the shoulders. His fingers crook like worms and travel down your arms and all the way down, down, down your skirt, and the rest is a big black nothing. Your eyes close and inadvertently tear up, and you think of your father, of how this sequence of events is just a lie, how Time is nothing more than a construct, but you don’t say anything because that’s what you do, be a good girl and do as you’re told.

Your mother sits by your side when you tend the other, smaller garden to the back of the house for the next few days. She just checks you out the corner of her eyes, doing nothing, saying nothing. Her body, next to yours, is a detritus on the surface, her silence an undercurrent. She takes the shovel from your hand, which looks less like a weapon in her possession. You sit together on the upturned rocks and watch your aunt watch her husband from a distance. When he leaves, you get down on your knees and rake the soil with your hands, but no matter what you do the pebbles won’t come off the hard earth. You try and try but the land refuses to be soothed, like an angry mother. It’s only the lilies that make a point by piercing through the soil and snaking skyward as if they, too, itch to leave the world.