“Who is it, Mom?” I heard Mel ask. The woman put her hand over the mouthpiece and there was a garbled dialogue.

“He’ll call you,” the woman said when she got back on.

“Tell him it’s Sally.”

“Oh, yes, he’s mentioned you. Good-bye now,” she said before I could give her the number.

“I thought about him in bed, you know,” I told Valeric. “I thought about my father, while Mel was making love to me.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Sick.”

“So that’s why you cut yourself. You never told me—did this ever happen with Carey?”

“I think I was just numb with Carey. And he didn’t know about Monkey King. He didn’t even know where the scars came from. I told him I’d had an accident on a picket fence.”

“Why do you think it was different with Mel?”

“I guess being sick made me weaker.”

“Is that what you would call it? Being weaker?”

I looked at my arm, the right one, without the scars, at the curve of the forearm bone, the pronounced knob on the outside of the wrist like my mother’s. My hands, of course, were my father’s. I imagined the way his long fingers had held the chalk as he stroked characters on the blackboard for his first-year class. Though my mother was known for being strict, Daddy was willing to be led off on a tangent. What are the characters for planet? for comet? his students would ask. He’d put down the chalk and tell them the legend of the herdsman and the weaving maid, two stars doomed to be separated by the Milky Way because they had loved each other too much and forgotten the rest of the world. My father would have turned it into a moral tale. The weaving maid had deserted her father for another man and he had punished her by forever denying her what she desired most.

After my session with Valeric I caught the bus to Woodside Avenue. When I walked in, using my key, I could smell pot roast in the oven. Ma was at the counter chopping carrots. “Lally’s coming to dinner,” she announced.

“Fine,” I said.

My sister was lying on the living room floor watching TV. “Hi,” she said, not looking up.

“I tried to call you,” I said. The sling was off, but she had an Ace bandage on her right forearm. It reminded me of the time I’d gone down to see her in Charlottesville.

“It doesn’t matter. The emergency’s over.”

“What emergency?”

“I thought I needed a place to stay. Dennis was going to kick me out.”

Dennis was the producer, the one she’d gone to France with. I said: “No wonder, if you spent all that time up in Vermont with some other guy.”

“Bill’s just a friend,” Marty said. “But you know men. Anyway, it’s all right now.”

“If it’s all right, then why are you here?”

“I’m still healing, stupid,” she said.

I went back into the kitchen, where Ma was making the salad. “Sal-lee, please get the dressing from the fridge.”

“I’ll make it from scratch,” I said. She watched suspiciously as I peeled a clove of garlic and chopped it, mixed oil and vinegar. When her back was turned I added mustard, ginger, sherry, soy sauce, and the scrapings of an old jar of honey I found in the cupboard. Then I ground some black pepper in.

“Don’t forget salt,” Ma said.

“Okay,” I said, ignoring her.

“I talk to Aunty Winnie today, she’s so excited.”

“Well, Xiao Lu’s her only child, it must be a big deal.”

“I tell her, lucky he’s a boy, she doesn’t have to pay.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“I ever tell you about my cousin in Shanghai, she got a divorce?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“In China this is unheard of. Her mother and father disown her. When they see her in the street, they look right through her. Like ghost.”

“What is the point of this story, Ma?”

“No point. Just conversation.”

Lally rapped on the side door and I went over to let her in. “Hey, sweetie!” she brayed, giving me a hug. “Boy, you look like you’ve been somewhere. Bonnie, did ya see how dark she is? Looks like a Malaysian, almost. Here, this is for you. To celebrate your birthday, but more importantly, your total and final recovery!” Never one to mince words, was Lally. I snuck a glance at Ma, saw that her mouth was set in a mean line. The gift was a pewter heart on a chain bracelet. “I got one for your sister too.” Lally, like my uncle, had always wished for daughters.

“Thanks, Lally. It’s beautiful.”

“Go set the table, Sally,” Ma said. “We eat in the dining room tonight.”

When we were all sitting down Lally said to me: “Now, I want to hear all about you. How are things in that big bad city?”

“Sally lost her job,” Ma said. “She quit, and she can’t get it back.”

“I’m freelancing,” I said.

“Just another word for unemployed.”

“Freelancing seems to be the thing these days,” Lally said. “God, this salad dressing’s divine, Bonnie, you’ll have to give me the recipe.” She started going on and on about some neighbor of ours who had a son who was a poet in New York and doing legal proofreading nights to pay the rent. She asked my sister, “And how did you say you made your living, dear?”

Marty yawned.

“She’s a clown,” I said. “She dresses up in a polka-dot suit and juggles at the South Street Seaport.”

“You have to start somewhere.” My mother smoothed her apron and smiled at Lally. “Now, how about dessert?”

After Lally left and Marty and I had loaded the dishwasher my sister retreated upstairs and I went into the living room and watched a couple of sitcoms. When I came into the kitchen for something to drink my mother was sitting at the table correcting papers. Flick, flick, flick. Marty and I used to imitate her on our already corrected school compositions and then hold them up shrieking: “I got a hundred!” It was one of the few things we did that could make Daddy look up from his newspapers.

I was leaning into the refrigerator and jumped at the sound of my mother’s voice.

“I call Valeric and she says you’re doing fine.”

“She said fine?”

“She said progress.”

“That’s a little different, Ma.”

“Maybe you don’t need her anymore.”

My mother’s stare was level, telling me nothing.

“I think it’s too soon to quit,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

“When do you think you’re going to get better?”

This was what she used to say when I was a little girl, home from school with the mumps or the measles. In the first hours of an illness, my mother was tender and magnanimous, running out to indulge every whim: a special brand of orange soda, a stuffed animal, another box of crayons. But then I’d wake up one morning to her standing over me: “You’ve been sick for two days. When do you think you can go back to school?”

I could think of several answers to Ma’s question: Therapy is a process, not an instant cure; someone who’s just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital needs to be followed up; or even the desperate, I’ll pay for it myself if I have to. They all sounded weak, unconvincing.

“It will probably take a little while. I’ll let you know.”

This was the wrong answer—I could tell from the look on her face.

“I don’t say anything when you’re in the hospital. I do all what Valeric says I should do, I even go to family therapy. But there’s no result!”

“What do you mean, no result? What did you expect?”

“You still don’t have decent job, you still see doctor all the time.”

“Ma, it’s only been a month!”

“I know all you do in Florida, your Aunty Mabel tells me. What kind of boy! Boy from the hospital!”

“Just leave Mel out of it.”

“You’re not so sick, you can fool around with this boy. You just feel sorry for yourself, I can tell. You think ‘Poor, poor Sally’ and you imagine everything that’s happen to you, what I do to spoil your childhood, terrible things about your daddy.”

“You didn’t spoil my childhood.”