Bernice and her parents ended up in the only house they could afford, where, she told Aaron, they were like three cabbages rolling around inside a produce drawer. By the time Aaron came to stay, they had occupied the house nearly a decade. It had grown even smaller with their belongings, yet they made room for him. Their living room contained three couches, and most nights he and Bernice lay on them, reading or talking. She never mentioned his mother, never asked whether he missed her. He knew that this was partly his fault because in those first weeks after she disappeared, he had pretended not to care; at the time, with his teachers looking sorry for him and his classmates ignoring him for a change (a gesture of kindness he supposed), it had seemed the only way to make it through the day. Instead, over the course of the year, Bernice told him the story of her life, in installments, each one perfectly composed so that he wondered whether she wrote it out and practiced telling it beforehand.
