For a second I thought she was chanting some weird new mantra. My mom, Liz Yang, is big on New Age stuff and what I like to call Mushy Arts. Years ago she'd studied the classics, like opera and literature. Nowadays it's candles, herbs, holistic medicine, and tai chi. While other kids get lectures on eating too much junk food, I get in trouble because my chakras are out of alignment. Go figure.

"Red glove, red glove," she said distractedly. She sifted through a pile of clothes, searching for the mate to the glove in her hand. The living room was covered with coats and scarves and umbrellas and gloves--- the entire contents of our front closet.

"Mom, it's after nine," I said, pushing aside a pile of hats to sit down on the sofa. "And it's a school night, for both of us." Mom was a guidance counselor at a junior high school. "Don't you think it's a little late for this?"

"I didn't get to it last weekend. Charles and I went to that holistic medicine seminar, remember? And I have to clean out the closets at the start of every school year," she said without looking up. "We need to create space for the good karma."

Staring at a pile of hats and mufflers, I recalled Mom's big redecorating scheme last month. Feng Shui. She'd put a basket of corn on the back of the toilet and hung crystals in the oddest places. I'd come home one day to find my desk turned away from the wall and a big red bow over my bed. It was all Charles idea. Charles Bai--- my mom's new boyfriend.

Mom says they're perfect for each other. I say their relationship is embarrassing. Charles is in grad school, and is a lot younger than my mother. I don't know. Maybe Liz is going through a kind of midlife crisis or something.

Closing my eyes on the colossal mess around me, I put my head back and sighed. When we first moved into this apartment, after the divorce, I thought it was temporary. I hoped that somehow my parents would get back together and we'd move home again, back to Taipei Heights. I remembered running from one house to another with my friends for tea parties and sleepovers.

But recently it hit me: We were not going back. And Dad was gone forever.

Not that he was dead or anything. That would make it too easy. Instead, I had to deal with the fact that I'd once had a father who loved me. Things were fine until I was ten or so. Then Dad and Mom started arguing all the time. Then he left. Mom was devastated. Whenever I asked her about it, she didn't want to talk. When I asked Dad, he promised that things between us wouldn't change.

Right. That lasted about four months. Then he got busy. He moved to Hongkong--- and never wrote or called. I think Mom hired some detective to track him down for child support, but I'm not sure.

I used to get mad at Mom for refusing to talk about it. But mostly I just hated Dad for leaving us. For a long time I hated him with a passion, but now it was a soft, distant kind of hate, like a dried-out flower that loses its scent.

Sometimes I wonder whether Dad would have stayed around if Mom hadn't been so flaky. It wasn't easy living with someone who wouldn't sign a contract because her astrologer told her the date was bad. That kept us out of this apartment for nearly a month! And then when we moved in, we had to put dishes of salt in all the corners to ward off some kind of evil. As a total package, Mom is definitely a trip.

Dad has been gone a long time now. When he left, I was ten and my brother, Dan, was in high school. Now Dan is twenty-one, and he's been to college and back. He dropped out and moved home right before school started for the year. He said he needed time and space to get his website business on track. Personally, I think any sentence that includes the phrase "time and space" is highly unreliable.

"There it is!" Mom said triumphantly. "Hand me that red glove from the pile beside you, Rainie."

I opened my eyes and fished a glove out from under a green-and-gold Panthers cap. Mom tucked the two red gloves together, dropped them onto a pile and stood back to assess.

"What's on clearance today, Mom?" I asked. "Coats? Mufflers? Two-for-one earmuffs?"

"These are rejects." She patted down one pile. "And these are keepers. Those earmuffs look moth-eaten." She frowned at a pair of fake sheepskin gloves. "This is complicated. I'll bet Neanderthal men and women grew fur or extra hair to keep them warm. A much better system than coats and all the paraphernalia that comes with winter."

I tugged a fuzzy pink hat over my head and turned to her. "But all that fur would be hot in the summer."

She smiled at me. "Pink is definitely your color, but that hat has got to go. It's unraveling."

Cheerfully, I tossed it into the reject pile. "You know, you can give most of this stuff away. Just save my down jacket and leather gloves, and maybe a few baseball caps. And Dan doesn't need anything." My brother always said he didn't feel the cold--- even when it was twenty below.

"Do you think so?" Mom looked thoughtfully at the keepers pile. "Well, I'll be happy to toss this old rag." She hoisted up her quilted denim jacket and made a show of heaving it into the reject pile.

I blinked. She'd had that jacket since before Dad left. Actually, Dad had bought it for her. "I thought you loved that coat."

"I may have liked it five years ago, but I've been dying to get rid of it for a long time. It's just that money's been tight around here, a little too tight for a new coat when that old lump was perfectly fine. Ugly as hell, but warm."

I stared at her. "Why didn't you tell me this before?" I asked her. "We could have come up with enough for a jacket."

She shrugged. "Dan needed a computer for college. Plus his tuition. You needed money for the class trip to Kenting. The car needed repairs. There was always something. It was hard to get ahead. But this year, I'm doing it. I got a brand-new jacket off-season, over the summer."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I mean, I knew things were tight, but I had no idea they were that bad.