And she found, as she sat near it at the window, that she truly did hate the thing. She had grown up very used to the absence of people in her life: her father, who had raised her himself after her mother split, had done more working than staying home and she had always been too cold to make many friends or find love, wherever it was. This ugly, lifelike thing seemed to almost breathe. It sat there with far too much presence for the woman to be comfortable. She regarded it with mild disdain and said, as if to a living person “Don’t look that way, don’t look so tragic and comfortable in my window. I hate you and I’ll have you gone before the week is out.” She paused as if waiting for a rebuttal, but the statue merely looked on as if she hadn’t said anything important at all.

A week after returning home, Ada helped her father clear away her mother’s presence. Clothes and shoes were put into boxes in the basement, her paintings–endless bleak desertscapes–were carefully wrapped and stored. The only thing allowed to stay was her dresser, with all of her perfumes and lotions still on top. They did, however, move this into Ada’s room, because even though her father couldn’t look at it all the time, he still wanted to every so often. Ada kept the dresser in her room but never touched a single piece of her mother’s finery. The perfumes, combs and hairbrushes went untouched because she didn’t want to make her father even sadder by walking around looking and smelling like her mother. How much help she was, Ada didn’t know because every now and then she would find her father sitting at the dresser and holding the different perfumes near his nose.