Robin was always careful with clothes but now she dropped her suitcase into the backseat and threw herself behind the wheel. Seth stood on the front porch wringing his hands. The car's engine squealed in pain as she backed out. Slamming its doors had felt good.

"I'll call you," she shouted. "I will. But not right away." She'd said it was a bad time to talk, that her father was waiting seventy-files miles away and that she was already two hours late. He'd come over anyway, wanting to talk again. At the first corner, Robin fought and lost to keep from glancing in the rearview mirror. One end of her skirt flittered like a black flag in the door well. The street was empty behind her.

She inched through traffic until reaching the crest of the Mississippi River Bridge. Below her, the sunset draped across the river and bayous on the far side, the interstate lanes emptying out heading west. Cypress trees reached over the guardrails, dipping their moss onto the shoulders. A heavy summer wind through the open windows lulled her into a doze of driving and half-formed thoughts. Pulling into Lafayette, she felt so sleepy she passed by her father's street and had to double back.

Turning around, like making a circle, made her irritated and awake. "Utopia Drive," she said aloud. Her hands clutched the wheel. "How typical of him." Most of the white or red brick cottages down the little side street sat behind neatly curbed lawns. Two blocks down, the streamlined box of Hank's new home reminded her of an Art Deco diesel train or the rocket ship in one of his old matinee serials, its aluminum siding glowing faintly silver.

One light burned from the front window. Low tables in the carport around back held what looked like her father's model spaceship collection. Robin tried to negotiate through to the back door but her hip knocked a corner. Something fell with a pitiable snapping sound. "Damn!" she said. As the overhead fluorescent lights flickered, she saw one of the model ships broken into three pieces on the concrete floor. Hank opened the door and Robin watched his smile collapse. "Dad, I'm sorry," she said. "I tried to be careful."

He picked the pieces up, holding them against his stomach. As he stood upright again, she noticed he'd put on weight. "I'd brought them out to put a fresh coat of sealant on," he said. "It was supposed to protect them."

The jagged ends of each piece looked mismatched, as if something in the middle had been lost. She stepped back. "You'd better take me inside," she said. "I think I've done enough damage out here."

After Robin's mother was diagnosed, the two women spent a Sunday afternoon packing Hank's sci-fi and fantasy collection into plastic boxes. When they were done, her mother savagely kicked a plastic crate overflowing with action figures. "God, I've come to hate the word," she'd said. "'Collectible.' More like 'closet-able.' At least now the house looks as if adults live here."

Robin had never heard herself referred to as an adult. She'd looked around at the emptied spaces in her parents' bedroom. Gaps spotted the dusty shelves where the figures had stood, as if they'd left footprints. The glass display cases held stale air. Hank said nothing but cleaned everything after the women were finished. A pungent, chemical smell lingered that made Robin's eyes water. Afterwards, she avoided that end of the hallway.

Now, looking around at her father's new living room made her fists clench. Cinder block and wooden plank shelves sagged under the weight of hundreds of toys. Paperback novels with cheap, gaudy covers lay in crooked stacks on the floor. Posters and prints hung thumb tacked above the furniture. The riot of color and the thousands of tiny eyes staring at her was too much. For the first time in a year, words like "armada" and "legion" came to her mind, echoing her mother's contempt. "You set it all up, didn't you?" she asked. "I might've guessed when I saw the carport."

Hank nestled into a replica of Captain Picard's chair on the Enterprise. A television remote slid forward from within the armrest. "The old place had gotten too big, you told me as much yourself." He frowned. "Having everything where I can see it is, well, distracting."

Robin took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "I wonder what Mom would think."

"I tell myself she'd understand." He looked around the room. "I'm also sure she wouldn't want us making one another worry. You took forever."

She nudged a wind-up robot with her foot. "Someone showed up as I was getting ready to go." Its arms and legs tangled around her ankle. "He's like you at those conventions. Can't get him to leave."

"There's no reason to get testy." Her father sat up straight. "Maybe I ought to show you your room." He held a hand up as she scowled. "Or the guest bedroom, whatever you want to call it."

He led her to a tiny bedroom set off to one side of the hallway. "I've been working on this all week," he said. Robin's knees buckled following him in. Hank had built an exact replica of her room at their old house, from before she'd left for college and her mother died. The white metal day bed and wooden dresser were in the same position, her two antique movie musical posters in their same spots on the new walls.

"I fell asleep on the road, didn't I?" she asked. This room was smaller than her old one, the furniture more cramped. Stepping inside, she felt vaguely overgrown. "I dream this waiting for the ambulance to arrive."

"Look at this." Hank drew open the closet door. Every costume she'd ever made, up to leaving home for college, hung sealed in airtight plastic. Robin felt the air rush out of her lungs. Mom's dresses are in there, too, she realized. "They're all here," her father was saying. "Even the ones you and Alice did together. I wrapped them up for the move." He pulled one off the rack. "Remember this one? It's the sorceress from that show you liked."

He handed her the hanger. The dress was a dark blue brocaded with delicate silver trim. Robin had started it as a Princess Leia costume until her mother insisted she alter it for a Renaissance fair. She held it by the hook and opened the top of the bag's zipper. "I was twelve," she said. "I spent weeks getting the pattern right."

"You did, I remember that," Hank said. "You know, for the life of me I can't remember the character's name."

Robin laid the outfit across the bed. "It was just 'The Sorceress'." The smell of mothballs drifted out from the dress' insides. "Mom always wanted me to make up a name and mail it to the show's producers." She looked past him into the closet. "Are all of them really there?"

Hank nodded. "Starfleet, the Jedi outfits, even the early ones you did for drama club," he said. "I've been a little disappointed you never wanted them back."

She set the outfit back and closed the closet door. "I guess I never thought about it," she said. "And I'm very tired."

After Hank excused himself, Robin opened all the other costume bags. What she found made her sick to her stomach. Under the mildew and wear and tear, she saw for the first time how the costumes' materials were raggedly stitched together, in many places patched with scraps on the inside. Most of the seams were jaunty, irregular lines that wandered along the piece ends. When her mother had worn them, Robin thought, the costumes were perfect and magical. She put everything back carefully but the stench of mildew clung to the air. Opening a window, she took shallow breaths to force the smell from her lungs.

Robin woke the next morning to hammering out in the hallway. She flung the door open and glared bleary-eyed at her father.

Hank sat atop a folding ladder with metal hooks clenched in his teeth. Sleek star cruisers and ovoid UFO's hung from the ceiling in a straight line behind him. "I've wanted to do this since I moved in," he said. "It'll run from one end of the house to the other."

She reached for her glasses. "This is how you spend all your time?"

"I'm retired and my only child is grown." He measured a length of wire with his thumb. "What else have I got?"

Robin reached for the underside of the nearest ship. Her fingers barely reached its underside. "You could use them for directions around the house, if you wanted," she said. "Tell company, 'just turn right at the Millennium Falcon for the bathroom'."

"The Falcon hangs over my room." Hank tapped at another nail. "Anyway, there's a convention in Baton Rogue tomorrow. My admiral uniform needs help, and I thought while you're here…" The patter of the hammer drowned out his voice.

"God, another convention," she said moving around him. "Don't you ever get enough of those things?"

He shrugged. "I guess inviting you along would be a waste of time."

"I just left Baton Rouge." She walked on tiptoes, raking her hand along the line. The ships wobbled on their strings. "But I'll look at your costume later, if you want."

Hank struggled to get down. "Somebody named Seth called for you this morning."

The house's only phone, she'd noticed the night before, was made like a Starfleet communicator. Robin couldn't imagine using it for a serious conversation, let alone for trying to reason with Seth. She shuddered. "What did you tell him?"

"That you were sleeping," Hank said. "He insisted I wake you."

"If he calls back, let me talk to him." She looked above the door to her room. "You left a gap in your parade."

Her father shrugged. "That's for the broken one," he said. "I have to buy some glue later."

Robin cleaned up and spent the day washing the gowns, scrubbing each in a pan of cold water with a soft sponge. The phone rang several times, friends of Hank's that were going to the convention. Each time the call wasn't Seth, she got angrier.

Robin met Seth at an Academy Awards party thrown by their college's theatre department, at a big wood frame house off campus. Televisions were set up in every room and on the back porch. She'd gotten drunk and was critiquing the actresses' gowns when he sat down next to her.

"You know what's ironic about the Oscar statue?" he asked. They were alone on the porch. "It's got half a head and no balls. Perfect for the film industry."

His narrow hips and waist, she thought drowsily, would be a pain in the ass to fit for a costume. "Don't talk," she said. "It'll just ruin this for the both of us."

He offered her a beer. "Not having a good time?"

Robin shook her head and jerked a finger at two ingénues gliding around onscreen. "They always show the people that win these things," she said. "I want to see the losers."

Seth leaned in as if to tell an important secret. "They get better parts in next year's movies."

Robin pulled away and took a deep swallow of beer. "But tonight, they're losers. See you later." She went inside and loudly performed impressions of the movie stars and then other people at the party, getting so obnoxious the costume manager offered to drive her home. On her way out, she spotted Seth talking with a group of other men.

"Losers!" she shouted, waving as the manager's car pulled away. He looked sad to see her go, she thought, his face became prettier when he frowned. Back at her apartment, she made sorrowful faces in the bathroom mirror, drinking more until she passed out early the next morning.

The Starfleet admiral costume was in good shape except the pants needed letting out around the waist. Robin took a straight razor to its seam as Hank stood over her, wearing the costume's red tunic over blue jeans. "You should at least wear something that fits," she said. "You've gained weight."

The razor made a popping sound cutting through the stitches. Hank looked down. "Well, if we're going to be blunt," he said, "you look almost frail."

She reached to wiggle a finger inside the tunic's collar, between his neck and its stiff cardboard lip. "I'll have to ease this some, as well," she said. "And I'm not frail."

"Don't believe me?" He took the pants from her and carefully folded them over his arm. "Look at that picture of you on the shelf. It's only two years old."

The photo was of Robin and her mother costumed as sorceresses for the last convention they'd attended. Behind them in a hotel lobby Klingons, vampires and Imperial Stormtroopers milled around between ballrooms. Her mother, she realized, had just begun to look sick but Robin was frightened more by her own image. She pestered Hank about it after dinner while putting finishing touches on the collar. "Are you sure the lens wasn't warped?"

"I'm sure." He sat in the captain's chair, flipping through channels. "You're much thinner than you used to be. Alice framed that right before she started chemo."

Robin glanced at the picture in its place on the shelf. She'd found her mother alone outside the hotel's ballroom, a string of vomit trickling down the older woman's gown. "My god," Alice had told her. "I've never felt so bad." They waited hours for Hank to find them, Robin getting her mother ice water or holding her hand. Two boys dressed as zombies walked by and she begged them to go find the man dressed as Darth Vader. When he appeared, they hurried home through the crowd of fans milling about in the parking lot. The cancer was diagnosed a few days later.

Hank turned the television on with his captain's chair. On the screen, two giant cartoon robots turned into jet planes and flew into outer space. "Are you sure you don't want to go to the con?"

The pants were done, the new seams invisible in the gold brocade of the leg. Robin held them up and shook them out. "It would feel weird without Mom," she said. "It feels weird enough being here." Back in her room, she laid the gowns across her bed, sketching out plans to repair the moth holes and correct the irregular stitching. They all looked too large, as if her arms and legs would vanish underneath the sleeves and ruffles.

Robin sat in the balcony watching the cast rehearse when Seth came up to her again. He wore one of the Russian cavalryman's uniforms she'd already sewn. "I feel positively gallant," he said. "All dressed up like this."

Like a child playing toy soldier, she thought. "Well, you don't look it."

He snapped his heels and crooked his arm in an elaborate salute. "Is that better?" he asked. "Want to get out of here?"

She smoothed the fabric of his waistcoat, pressing out its wrinkles. "I don't date actors," she said.

"Come on," Seth said, dropping onto the seat next to hers. "You look like you could use a good time."

She turned back to watch the stage. "Screw you."

"I don't mean it like that." He leaned into her line of sight. "You look unhappy. I'm saying, let's have a good time."

What the hell, she thought. I'm lonely. They went to a bar and talked until closing. Robin told him about her mother's death. "I'm furious all the time," she said. "Everyone that didn't know her seems like an imbecile."

Seth nodded in a way anyone watching from a balcony would recognize as understanding. "Other people think you're a bitch," he said. "But I think there's something else."

Robin fidgeted. "Don't you dare say a heart of gold. I won't believe it."

He smiled. "I was going to say I think you're beautiful."

That did it. By the end of the night, she was drunk in his living room, watching pink daylight break over the roofs. Seth got up and left the room, coming back with blankets and a pillow. "I wish things were better for you," he'd said. "I'd like you to think of me as gallant."

Robin recognized them from his own bed, having passed by and peeked in on her way to the bathroom. Taking a deep breath, she pulled his face close and kissed him, leading him down the hall. When it was over, she waited until he was asleep and drove home on empty streets. Her clothes felt snug in odd places.

"It's me that's different," she told herself. "The clothes wear strangely because I can still feel where he touched me."

A week later, after they'd made love all night, he took her to a diner out by the highway. Robin went along, bleary-eyed, blowing cigarette smoke into the gray morning. Work was going to be torment, she thought, bolts of cloth sat waiting to be made into an entire coterie for the King Lear production next month. Worst of all, her father had called that night. "Come see what I've found!" he'd said. "This whole house could be a collector's item!"

Seth waved a hand in front of her face. "Earth to Robin."

"That sounds like something my father would say," she snarled.

He blushed. "It's just an expression."

"Dad bought a new place." She lit another cigarette. "I was thinking of going to see it."

"Sounds like fun," Seth said. "Want me to come with you?"

The cigarette tasted foul. She stamped it out. "Don't you ever get tired of me?" she asked. "I get tired of myself, sometimes."

Seth squeezed her hand. "When you're not mad, you feel good to be around."

Robin pulled her hand away. I wish my skin were toxic, she thought. If your hand burned, maybe you'd understand what I'm trying to say. She kept silent while they ate. When later he dropped her off she said, "The hell with you and your pity," watching him drive away.

Hank stood in the carport. Robin thought his costume looked absurd on his obese hips and stomach. "I wish you'd come with me," he said. "It would do you good to get out and do something."

"I'm doing something," Robin replied. "I'm getting time by myself."

"Well—" he began. "Anyway, I'll be back late tonight. Don't wait up."

Robin went back inside. She'd cleaned and repaired most of the costumes as much as she could, laying the ones that might still closely fit her across the bed. Trying them on took deliberate movements, being careful of each button and clasp. Only one of her mothers' still fit perfectly, a red floor length gown with emerald trim on the neck and arms. The emerald was faded and in some places flaking off.

The phone rang and she hurried into the living room. Answering it, she heard a popping static in the background. Seth's voice startled her. "It's the television," he explained. "Hold on, let me turn it down."

The sound faded away. Robin gripped the phone. "You didn't do what I asked," she said. "You shouldn't have called this morning."

"I was worried." The silly Star Trek phone brought his voice into its imaginary world. "I thought maybe you'd been in a wreck or something."

"No wreck," Robin said, "but I'm not having a great time, either."

"Are you still coming back tomorrow?" As he spoke, she realized she'd missed his voice.

"I'm such a mess." She looked down at the costume wrapped around her body. "Can you believe, I'm in one of my mom's old gowns right now?"

His voice sharpened. Robin imagined his face did, as well. "Baby, that can't be healthy."

"I know," she said. "It's weird, here. Look, will you call me later? I'll need to hear your voice. I should take this off and think."

"Okay." He paused. "Take care of yourself." He hung up.

The costume felt ridiculous and her fists clenched around its fabric. She went back to her room and put everything into the closet, but stopped and caught her breath. The room felt barren without everything in sight. For a moment Robin panicked that they'd be somehow lost or even stolen and took them all out again. All the mistakes in their construction were still obvious. In the hallway under the empty spot in the line of models, she tried to remember what they looked like when they were new.

Robin had waited for Seth at the foot of the stage. The Cherry Orchard premiere was over and he'd come out from behind the curtain still in his waistcoat and breeches. "Did you make up your mind?" he'd asked.

She pictured Seth and her father comparing fantasy worlds. "I'm leaving tomorrow," she said. "I don't want you to come."

Seth's makeup had run under the heat of the stage lights. Robin noticed a greasy smudge on his collar. She reached to wipe it off but he pulled her hand away and spoke in a voice she didn't recognize. She hadn't heard him angry yet.

"You're treating me like you do everybody else," he said. "I'd hoped you wouldn't do that."

"That's me," she said. The grease clung to her fingers. "I want to be by myself. You calling five times a day is weird."

Seth leaned in to embrace her, but she turned and walked back up the aisle, away from the glare of the stage lights. He'd left two messages on her machine by the time she'd gotten home. She called her father instead, saying she'd be out to visit the next day.

Robin sat smoking in the captain's chair when Hank returned from the convention and put two bags of souvenirs on the coffee table. "I would've brought you something if I thought you wouldn't strangle me."

She pulled a Han Solo figure off the floor. "What do you get from this stuff?" she asked. "Mom put up with it for your sake."

Hank reached into one of the shopping bags and cracked a figure out of its plastic case. "These things never move," he said. "Most things—people—move at the speed of light." He set the figure on a bare spot of shelf. Ten years from now, Robin thought, that lump of plastic will be in that exact same spot.

Her father sighed. "I remember when I used to come home late from a convention." He glanced over at the front door. "Your mother would wait for me. When you got old enough, so would you."

Robin folded her arms. "You acted like we were a nuisance," she said. "A distraction from your flights of fancy. And you still love all this."

The figure fell forward and dropped to the floor. "I thought the future…" He looked down at it. "Now you're both gone, and that's what's terrible. I'm sorry."

Robin imagined her father as a lonely little man in a gaudy house surrounded by toys. She went outside where the houses up and down Utopia Lane waited peacefully, some lit from within and others dark. She sat a while watching her father's silly silver house reflect the last of the day's sunlight.

Hank came out a while later, holding a yellowed paperback. "Imagine what this house would be like without gravity," he said, sitting next to her on the curb.

Robin threw her cigarette into the street. "You're never going to let up, are you?"

He put the book down between them. "I wish you wouldn't be ashamed of me."

"That's not it," Robin said. "If I don't do everything the way I think Mom would've, I'm afraid of forgetting her."

"She wasn't ashamed of me," her father said. "Maybe not all the time, anyway."

Robin rubbed her eyes. "Those dresses are falling apart. And they weren't made that well to begin with." She would've said more, but her father put his arm around her shoulders and they sat silent.

Later, they were watching television when the telephone rang. Robin bolted up from her seat. Seth started to speak but she cut him off. "Would you come visit us?" she asked. "Just to see the place?"

"I don't know," he said. Robin thought he spoke as if reciting lines, but she ignored it. "If I drive all the way there and you shut me out…"

"You wanted to earlier." She looked at the toys strewn all over the house. There wasn't time to organize anything. "Say you'll come. I need you to see this."

"Let me think." She listened to him draw in breath. "I'll get there when I can," he said. Robin wanted to yell, but stopped herself.

She paced through the house until her father asked her to relax or join him on the couch. Going out to the street, she looked down the two blocks to the highway, at the headlights racing past. She realized Seth could be in any one of the cars and tried to make out the people inside, but couldn't see through the darkened windows. Her jeans and blouse felt dirty and awkward, as they had driving home after their first night together.

He should be here soon, she told herself. I have to hurry.

In her bedroom, the dresses waited in their places, each one with something she'd have to mend later. She picked out one of her own gowns that almost fit, pale yellow with white trim, pinning the shoulders back and lifting its skirt. Looking in the bathroom mirror, she realized it fell empty and loose over her body. She changed into the red and emerald gown of her mother's and hurried out to the highway.

I'll tell him I made this one myself, she thought. The woody smells of mold and time had been scrubbed carefully out the day before, air-dried in the rural summer breeze. He'll believe I've changed if I tell him it's one I made by myself. He can be gallant and I can be different.

Only a few cars straggled down the highway that late at night, their headlights slicing between the trunks of the pines. The gown's red fabric became darker in their glow. When a car turned into the street, Robin's heart jumped and her hands flew from her sides. Please let that be Seth, she thought stepping forward.