In the middle of the day, when my dad is at work and my mom is painting her nails or watching QVC, I walk the streets of Anaheim, generally ending up at the same manicured park with a pink marble fountain in the center. I am rarely approached here when I go out, and if I am, I politely decline to take any photos. People in small cities are different—they need less from you. I thought it would be hard to disappear, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing in the world. Whoever you may have been, you’re forgotten as soon as you pass the San Fernando Valley.

For my family’s part, they don’t question my presence. Awards season came and went, and we all pretended that my eight-year career never existed. Maybe they’re respecting my privacy, or maybe they really don’t care why I’m here. Maybe I lost that privilege when I moved away, or that first Christmas I didn’t come home, or maybe it was all the ones after that. When I’m being honest with myself, I understand that I only came back here because I knew it would be like this—that as much as I don’t know how to ask for anything, my family also wouldn’t know how to give it to me.

CHAPTER THREE

The air feels crisper than it has in a long time when I wake up, and I’m feeling okay, about to go for a walk when my mom stops me.

“Grace, shall we go for a drive?” she asks.

I stand in the hall, confused because this isn’t how it has worked for the last 360 days that I’ve been home. My parents drive to the supermarket for a food shop once a week, and I supplement this with trips to the drugstore for all the products my mom refuses to buy in front of my dad, even after thirty years of marriage: her diet pills and panty liners and my tampons. Every other Sunday we go for lunch at the Cheesecake Factory and my dad orders three Arnold Palmers and extra bread before we’ve even sat down. My parents share the fish tacos, while I alternate between the orange chicken and the pasta carbonara. Very occasionally my parents will drop in to a mixer at a neighbor’s house, and afterward my mother will act as if she spent the entire evening being waterboarded, as opposed to just engaging in polite conversation about the best local schools or how to circumvent Anaheim building code regulations to install a sauna in your guesthouse. We do not go on drives together. It’s funny how easy it is to become a creature of habit, even when those habits are not your own.

“Do you need something?” I ask, trying not to sound suspicious.

“If you have other plans, then just say,” my mom says testily, and I shake my head.

“No I don’t, obviously I don’t,” I say as she gathers up her navy quilted coat and slips her feet into a pair of old UGG boots. The ankles cave inward heavily over the soles and I look away, focusing on zipping up my jacket instead.

When we get to her car, she hands over the keys, even though I can’t actually recall ever having driven my mother anywhere in my life. I pull out of the driveway before switching on the radio, which she immediately turns down.

I glance over at her and she frowns.

“Watch the road, Grace, and stop rushing. Remember, one stop sign at a time. Who taught you how to drive?”

I try to remember who did teach me to drive, but it’s lost somewhere in the blur of faces and locations that make up the latter part of my teen years. It wasn’t her or my dad, is the point she’s trying to make. I slow down extra early for the stop sign, to make her happy.

“So, next week it will be a year you’ve been staying with us.” My mother rifles in her bag for something as she talks.

“So it will be,” I say, rolling through another stop sign.

“And obviously your sister will be back in a couple of weeks for Thanksgiving break.”

“I’m aware of that too,” I say, even though I hadn’t remembered. My sister, Esme, returns home from her boarding school in Northern California four times a year, and we are all forced to spend the duration of her stay pretending to be marginally higher functioning than we are, with nightly trips to various chain restaurants, where slices of anodyne predictability are served up alongside the pizza. Everything we say has to be bright and constructive, and I have to try not to feel envious of the way my mother disguises her indifference to us all only for Esme’s benefit, her interest fading again the minute my sister’s left.

“So, any danger of you having figured your life out by then?”

“I’m taking a break, Mom,” I say. “Who would pick up your HRT if I wasn’t here? Esme can’t drive.”

My mom raises her eyebrows at my tone and I eventually have to turn away. I wonder if this was her big idea, to lure me into a confined space with her so that she can interrogate me about my future.

“I thought you’d like having me at home.”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with us,” she says. “It never has.”

I can’t say anything now because she has played her best hand early: I was the one who left them.

“You know it’s actually not healthy being back at home when you’re grown up. It’s called arrested development. Cynthia told me about it.”

“Mrs. Porter told you about arrested development?” This surprises me, mainly because I’d always assumed this particular neighbor was borderline senile. She wears a thick bathrobe covered in fluffy yellow ducks when she waters the plants lining her drive. “You know some of the Kardashians still live at home. At least I left and then I came back.”

“That’s not even slightly true. Kim and Kanye moved in with Kris while they were redoing their house, but even the younger girls don’t live there anymore. Kylie bought a house in Calabasas and flipped it for three million. Plus, she’s a mother now.”

“This is really sad, Mom. You know too much about them. You shouldn’t even know where Calabasas is.”

“Turn left here,” my mom says, ignoring me.

I take a left, promising myself that I can turn left again in three blocks. Thank god for the grid system. I slow down to let an old woman with a walker cross the road. My mom makes an impatient noise and I try not to smile.

“Grace, you have a house in Venice and you made 3.2 million dollars on your last movie. You can’t actually be telling me that you’re happy here.”

“How do you know that?”

“Google,” she says.

“Great, well there’s taxes and commission on that, you know,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “And you moved from London to a house the color of Pepto Bismol in Anaheim, but you’re telling me that you’re happy here.”

“We’re older than you. Happiness is no longer relevant,” she shoots back, and I wish she hadn’t because the phrase settles somewhere deep inside me. I open the window, and for once it’s cold enough in Southern California that I can see my own breath.

“Okay, little miss sunshine. Let’s try this. Tell me one time you’ve been happy since you’ve been back. And I’m talking genuinely happy. If you can do that, and I believe you, then I’ll leave you alone.”

I pull up at a traffic light and turn to look at her. My mom’s hair is still red, but it’s finer now and dusted with silver at the roots. Her beauty has become slightly distorted with age, as if her features are now too big for her face.

“I was happy last week when we went to Costco and they had the giant version of that hot sauce we both love.”

My mother looks at me like I’m insane, and I shrug.

“Can you pull in here?” my mom asks, pointing to the parking lot of a health-food store I’ve never been in, and after a moment I oblige.

“I’ll be two minutes,” she says, and I watch as she walks into the store. While she’s inside, I stare at the window display, where the same photo is repeated at least twelve times in various sizes. The photo shows a man holding an iron dumbbell, his neck swollen with engorged veins and his body angled into a deep squat. They probably could have chosen a different position.

My mom opens the car door and slides back into the passenger seat.

“They don’t have my pills here either,” she says.

“Okay,” I reply, unsure of what else to say. My parents do not like change. It’s like they decided that the move from England would be their final adjustment in life so they just buckled in instead, waiting to grow old and die. It’s easy to forget that neither of them has even turned fifty yet.

I reach out and touch her arm. She pulls away instinctively, and I realize I can’t remember the last time we touched each other on purpose. Before I moved to LA, I guess.

“So are we going home?” I ask.

She nods, and tunes the radio to a country music station.

“You know those pills are basically speed,” I say after a moment. “They’re not good for you.”

“Are you sure you’re qualified to give me a lecture on drugs, Grace?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just skip a couple more meals and then we’ll talk,” I say reflexively, and she pulls away from me as if I’ve bitten her.

I keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead, and I spend the rest of the journey home thinking of all the things I could have said instead of that.

CHAPTER FOUR