The narrator, Uche, is a woman who finished graduate school two years earlier but still needs her father to help her buy a mattress. As disappointed as she is about this, she is more upset that her father shows up with her mother, who died eight years earlier. This version of her mother resembles a photograph from 1982, which Uche later searches for in her family’s house.

Uche decides not to return to her apartment, but she can’t understand why her father and sister, Udoma, simply accept that their mother is back from the dead. Uche reflects on how she overreacted to events when she was young and often stole things. After Udoma was born, those tantrums and tendencies turned into a milder egocentrism, which sparked her last conversation with her mother.

Her mother’s death had a profound impact on Uche, who ran away to Alabama and overdosed on pills. Her father found her and had her hospitalized. It took her a year and a half to recover enough to continue her master’s degree. She only moved out on her own a year prior to the story’s opening, and she still has trouble holding a job. Udoma senses Uche’s

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