As we drive home, Mom tells me what happened in the meeting and then doesn’t say much else because she says she’s still processing. I guess I am, too. When Dr. McKenny said that thing about how we’re still reading the book, she missed the point. I’m sad she keeps missing the point. She’s a principal. She should know how to not miss the point.

But more than that, she should know how to treat my mom. Mom is a tryer. She gives people a lot of chances to do what they say they’ll do and she trusts people—even when she probably shouldn’t.

“How do you feel about it?” Mom asks.

I’m mad, but I’m somehow pretending I’m not. It’s like I’ve inherited long-grass disease from the grown-ups around me. “I don’t know,” I answer. “I think she should care more.”

We park and get out of the car. I get the mail from the mailbox because it’s my favorite thing even though no one ever sends me anything. There’s a magazine and two bills for Mom.

We walk into the house and see the same things at the same time. We both freeze two steps into the living room. Some of our stuff is gone. It looks like we got robbed by a burglar who does interior design. Mom’s favorite chair is still here, and the rocking chair, too, but the rug that was under them is gone. The dining table is here but the centerpiece is missing.

The bookshelves are gap-toothed—random books seem to be gone.

The rug from in front of the kitchen sink—gone.

“Dad?” Mom says. She knocks on his basement apartment door. Opens it. Repeats, “Dad?” Grandad doesn’t answer. It’s Friday. He’s not usually gone on a Friday.

She fast-walks around the house and I follow, finding weird empty spaces where our things once were. One of a set of table lamps. A small pottery vase.

“My knitting bag?” she says.

“My baseball stuff isn’t in the closet,” I point out.

She jogs up the stairs to her bedroom. I go to the garage door and open it.

The spacecraft is gone.

His tools are gone.

“Dad?” I yell.

Mom is upstairs yelling, “Mike?”

I yell, “Grandad?”

She yells, “Dad?”

I go upstairs to my room. Nothing seems to be missing. It’s the same mess I left it as this morning on my way to school. For some reason at this moment, I make a deal with myself to clean up my room every night so Mom doesn’t have to say anything to me about it.

“Dad?” she says.

I go to her room. She’s on her phone, sitting on her bed. All the family pictures she’d framed and put on the walls and the furniture are still there but two paintings are gone, the screws that held them still in the walls.

“Where are you?” she asks him.

All Dad’s dress clothes are gone from the closet where he kept them. It’s like we were robbed but also abandoned at the same time. I’m not stupid. I know what’s happening. I just didn’t think Dad was this mean. Or whatever this is.

“I think Mike cleared out the house and took off,” she says. And in that last part, I can hear her voice buckle under itself. She stays still on the bed. Sighs. I hear Grandad say, “I’ll be right there.”

Mom hangs up the phone and looks at me. I look at her.

Then she offers me a hug and all the mad I was hiding in the car is like a tiny little fish and this huge other fish just ate it and absorbed the mad and now I’m like a huge mad fish that wants to eat all the little mad fish so I can become a fish capable of eating a whole planet. A galaxy. Dad’s galaxy. I want to eat that.

“I am so sorry,” Mom says as we hug.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell her.

“I don’t even know what to say.”

I can feel her tears seeping through my shirt. I think there’s snot running from my nose and I don’t care.

“You think he just left? Like—forever?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t know.”

“I’m so mad. I don’t understand.”

“Why would he take our things? Those were our things!”

“He took my baseball stuff,” I say. “He doesn’t even like baseball.”

“Oh, Mac, I’m so sorry. We can replace it. I promise.”

I don’t tell her about the lucky rock in my baseball backpack—the one from the game when I hit my first home run. I don’t want to make her feel worse.

We sit like this for a few minutes—hugging and saying things that seem unreal. Asking each other questions we can’t answer. Why did he take a vase? Why did he take the rug?

Before Grandad gets home five minutes later, we breathe a lot and really look around. Dad took some light bulbs and batteries from the light-bulb-and-battery drawer. “And my face cream,” Mom says. “Why would he need my face cream?”

I thought I’d seen Grandad mad before. After he hugs Mom and gives me a hair ruffle at the same time, and after he looks into my mom’s eyes real close-up and says, “We will get through this,” he holds his arms out and breathes a huge breath and then he walks to the garage door and sees how empty the garage is and lets loose a deep howl and curses about ten bad words over and over and over. He walks around the empty space in the garage and then sits down cross-legged on the cement floor and closes his eyes.

I go to the kitchen and get a glass of water for Mom, who is sitting in her chair, now with no rug under it. She thanks me and says, “Get one for yourself, too, bud.”

The garage door is still open and Grandad is still sitting and meditating on the floor.

I get him a glass of water and one for myself, and by the time I’m out in the living room again, Grandad is there and he looks calm.

He says, “I’m calling the police.”