“Look at your fucking car,” I said, stabbing a finger toward the wreckage. “When I pulled up I figured I was an orphan! We are going.”

I followed behind the ambulance to Riverbend, the same hospital where my mother had stayed when the first chemo knocked her off her feet, the same one we returned to after our trip to Korea. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining. There was a wooden portico over the front entrance and a stone fireplace in the lobby that gave off the feeling of a haunted lodge. The long width of the building with its yellow light shining out in the night—it was a difficult image to confront again. By the time I found parking and made my way up to the room, there were already two police officers questioning my father.

“Why are you slurring your words?”

“I’m not slawring my…” My father paused. “Well now I am because I’m thinking about it,” he said with a laugh. The mouthwash was burning a hole in my coat pocket.

“Please,” I said. “My mom just died.”

I wasn’t sure if I was crying out of fear that my father would get a DUI and I’d be stuck in Eugene as his personal chauffeur, or if I was simply overwhelmed by the feeling that fate was out to destroy us.

“I’m just going to go ahead and say you fell asleep at the wheel,” the cop said, eyeing my father suspiciously. I felt my dad put a hand on my back to really sell the scene.

We were discharged within a couple of hours and I drove the two of us home. I refused to speak to him. Now that I knew he was okay, fear for his safety subsided and gave way to anger, pulsing through me.

“I’m telling you, I just fell asleep,” he repeated.

It was a miracle he hadn’t broken any bones, but he was still in a tremendous amount of pain. He was taking prescription drugs, many of them the same ones my mother had taken. They made him even more depressed. He slept most of the day. For three days my father hardly left his room. Part of me wondered if he had run himself off the road on purpose, which only made me more upset. I made little effort to check in on him. I wanted to be selfish. I didn’t want to take care of anyone anymore.

Instead, I began to cook. Mostly the kind of food you could crawl into and that required sleeping off. The kind you’d order on death row. I made chicken pot pie from scratch, rolling out buttery, homemade dough, filling it to the brim with thick, rich stock and roasted chicken, peas, and carrots, blanketing it in its flaky top crust. I barbecued steaks and served them with smooth, creamy mashed potatoes or gratin dauphinois or baked potatoes with half-inch pats of butter and heaping scoops of sour cream. I baked giant lasagnas, smothering them with homemade Bolognese and fistfuls of shredded mozzarella.

For Thanksgiving, I spent weeks researching and collecting recipes online. I stuffed and roasted a ten-pound bird from Costco and made cranberry blizzard—ice cream with Cool Whip and cranberry jelly—which Aunt Margo had taught my mother to make. I served sweet potatoes with marshmallows and gravy made from scratch.

Another night I bought lobsters, taking time to observe them in the supermarket tank, sussing out the liveliest of the bunch. I instructed the fishmonger to lift them with his plastic rake and tickle their tails like my father taught me, picking the ones that flipped violently and with gusto. I boiled them in a large pot and set out the same small bowls my mother would for the melted butter. When they were cooked through, my father made two hacks in the center of their claws and large incisions down their backs.

When we ate lobster, my mother used to boil one for each of us and content herself with a side of corn or a baked potato or a small bowl of rice with banchan and a can of saury, an oily fish she braised in soy sauce. But if we were lucky enough to find some, she’d eat the roe, giddily scooping the plump orange eggs onto her plate.

We sat down to eat and twisted the tails to separate them from their bodies. We flipped them over and cracked the shells in half.

“No eggs,” he said with a sigh as he continued disembodying the rest of the carcass, sucking the gray goop from inside.

“Me neither,” I said, splitting a claw with a nutcracker.

* * *

—

BY CHRISTMAS Peter’s classes were finally finished and he moved in with us. The two of us picked out a Christmas tree from the nursery down the road. Without my mother it felt like we were playing house. Peter took my father’s role, lying beneath the tree, rotating the screws on the stand as I tried to see it through my mother’s eyes and stop him where it looked the fullest. My mother kept our Christmas decorations upstairs in a hallway closet, padded in newspaper and divided into three matching hat boxes. The lights were wrapped around old copies of Time magazine that had been rolled into cylinders.

This closet was just one of the many depots my mother counted on to house what had become, over the course of her lifetime in Eugene, an unfathomable quantity of high-quality junk. A decorative wooden birdcage, bowls full of colorful glass cylinders and bulbs, a collection of candles still wrapped in cellophane. Every alcove and cubby was filled to the brim with QVC, dozens of unused eye creams and serums, chopstick holders and napkin rings.

Hadn’t Eunmi’s death taught her anything? I wondered. Why had she held on to the warranties for every appliance in the house? Routine car maintenance receipts from more than twenty years ago?

In the recess of the hallway closet, I was confronted by the teeming reliquary of my childhood souvenirs. Every single report card I ever received was stored away in a manila envelope. She saved the poster board from my third-grade science fair. There were diaries she forced me to keep when I was learning to write. “Today mommy and I went to the park to feed birds.”

I was just beginning to resent her for the hoarding she’d left me to deal with when I found them: two pairs of baby shoes. They were perfectly preserved, one a pair of sandals made of three pinched white leather ribbons that clasped together at the ankle, one a pair of pink canvas slip-on sneakers with a colorful plaid interior. They were so small I could fit them in the palm of my hand. I held one of the sandals and started to cry. I thought of the foresight a mother must have to preserve this kind of thing, the shoes of her baby, for her baby’s baby someday. A baby she’d never get to meet.

My mother kept a great many things for my future child. I found it strangely therapeutic to organize them. I spent at least a week sorting my Playmobil collection into complete sets. In my father’s largely unused office, I emptied out the mismatched kits and sorted them into piles. I counted out eight teal teacups the size of corn kernels and reunited them with the other elements of the hot dog stand. I found two rings of fire and put them back into the circus. I spread out the articles of the Victorian mansion on the beige carpet and ran my hands over the tiny pieces of plastic, searching for the miniature blue cap that belonged to the blond boy who lived there with the brown-bobbed girl in the pink shirt and white pants.