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someone might catch me, but my father suddenly appeared from behind me. There was no time to mask what I was doing. My father’s eyes met mine just as the flame touched the cigarette. He stopped in his tracks and eyed me for a moment, and then he turned around and walked away without saying a word. I prepared to be scolded harshly. I even thought that if we argued, it might take away the silence and solitude that had drawn a heavy curtain between father and daughter. But to my surprise, he did not say a word at the dinner table. I thoughtmaybe it was painful for him to see me lighting a cigarette and he had chosen to pretend he saw nothing instead. A strange anger rose up inside me. I wanted him to scold me. That way, I could smoke without feeling guilty. I started to clear the table, but he suddenly asked if I wanted to dye my nails.
    “Dye my nails?”
    “I don’t know if you remember but once, when you were little, I dyed your fingernails with balsam flowers.”
    Did he? I looked down at my hands where they held the dinner tray.
    “When you unwrapped the orange dye from your fingers in the morning, you screamed, ‘My nails are bleeding!’ You ran to the well and stuck your hands in the cold water. You were so little …”
    On summer nights when my mother was sick, my father crushed up balsam petals, put them on her fingernails, wrapped them in plastic, and bound them with thread. She had asked him to do it for her. He said he wondered if the balsam was the reason the anesthesia did not take well during her surgery. After clearing the dinner table, I watched as he placed the crushed balsam flowers on my fingernails, and I asked weakly, “Dad, does dyeing your nails with this really stop anesthesia from working?” He murmured, “I’m not sure.”
    I thought, I’m sorry, Mama. I won’t smoke again, Mama .
    That night, I tied string around my fingertips and went with Dahn to the field on the edge of town. Dahn was home for a visit from the southern city where he was attending college. We walked over the railroad ties in the dark. Since moving south for college, Dahn had become taciturn, like myfather, and his brow seemed permanently furrowed. His chin was unshaven and he refused to smile, as if he had made up his mind to not be nice to anyone. Not even me.
    “Dahn,” I said, and turned him around by one shoulder in the dark. We were separated by endless rows of black railroad ties. “Would you like to see my mother’s grave?”
    I didn’t think he would agree so readily. He nodded right away and said he would stop by his house first to get his headlamp.
    “Headlamp?”
    “I use it for night hikes or anytime I go out walking late at night.”
    “Do you mean the thing miners use?”
    “That’s an actual helmet. Mine is smaller. I have trouble sleeping so I use it in the dorm to sketch by. If I leave the lamp on, my roommate can’t sleep. I keep the headlamp in my bag and use it outside, as well.”
    Did he really just say he wears a headlamp in the middle of the night to sketch by?
    This Dahn who talked about sketching by the light of a headlamp because he could not sleep seemed like a stranger to me. We left the train tracks and walked to his house in silence. Our shadows crisscrossed each other on the wall. Dahn snuck into his house and came back with his headlamp. He tried to put it on my head.
    “No, you wear it,” I said. “Walk ahead of me.”
    Dahn put the lantern on. When the light flicked on over his forehead, he looked like a different person. We cut through a field and headed toward the mountain where my mother was buried.
    “You handled it well,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Your mother.”
    Feeling a sudden pang in my chest, I hooked one of my fingers, still bound with cotton thread, around Dahn’s pinky.
    After Mom died, I stopped reading books.
    My cousin called and tried to get me to go to church, but I did not want to listen to anyone. I did nothing the whole year. On days when the