The Perfect Place

Dad has been gone exactly two months, one week, and four days when Mom stands up and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” I ask.
“This,” she says, waving her skinny brown arms around like a crazy person. “Stay here in this apartment. I can’t do it. Your father is everywhere in it.”
“No, he’s not,” my sister Tiffany says, looking around from her spot beside me on the couch. She’s seven and what my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Levy, would have called very literal-minded.
But Mom is right, I guess. Dad is everywhere in Apartment 2F–his coffee mug is still in the dish drainer and all but two pairs of his shoes are still lined up against the far wall in Mom and Dad’s bedroom. The book he’s reading is still sitting on his nightstand. I like the way the house seems to be waiting along with us for him to come back. But Mom says it again: “I can’t do this.”
“What are we going to do, then?” I ask.
Mom doesn’t answer. Instead she goes over to the framed pictures on the mantel. She slides the photo of the four of us at the Meadowlands Fair from one location to another like a game of magic-cup shuffle until it winds up at the far end of the shelf almost out of sight and right be side the picture of her steely-eyed aunt Grace. Mom stares down at Great-Aunt Grace’s picture for a long time, and I wonder if she’s thinking about how, on their wedding day, Great-Aunt Grace told Mom not to marry Dad because he was a rolling stone if she ever saw one. Mom told me this story once when she was mad at Dad for staying out for two days and neglecting to call. I asked Mom what it meant to be a rolling stone and she pressed her lips together and shook her head, like she was sorry she’d told me the story in the first place.
Mom turns to face us now.
Please don’t say we have to leave without Dad.
Tiffany moves closer to me on the couch, rests all of her weight on me. I can’t breathe. I take a puff of my inhaler. The cool air fills my lungs.
Don’t say we have to leave without Dad.
“What are we going to do?” I ask again, my heart banging against my ribs like a paddleball.
“We’re going to evacuate the premises,” Mom says.