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just the right size for you. You sweep, I’ll dust, and then we will unpack.” So while Mom dusted the walls and the cots with a dish towel she had brought with her, Tomi swept the floor. She wet a newspaper she’d taken from the trash pile, then dropped clumps of it onto the floor so that the dirt would stick to the paper as she pushed it around with the broom. Then the two shoved the suitcases against a wall and opened them. Mom took out a sheet and held it up. “If they don’t give us a wall for a bedroom, we’ll make our own,” she said. “Roy can figure out how to hang the sheet. Our cots will be on one side, theirs on the other.”
    Tomi went to her suitcase and took out a pretty yellow-flowered skirt. Mom had made it for her, using three yards of material. “This would make curtains,” Tomi said. “I could tear out the hem and open up the waistband. We brought needles and thread. I could sew the curtains by hand.” Mom’s sewing machine had been sold for a dollar.
    “A good idea,” Mom told her. “First we make up a table.”
    “But we don’t have a table,” Tomi said.
    “We will use the stove. Who needs a stove to heat the room in August?”
    Tomi hummed as she and Mom took out the tablecloth, folded it, and placed it on top of the stove. Mom had never before asked her to help arrange a room. They unpacked the teapot and cups and Tomi placed them on the tablecloth. Mom stood back and admired the arrangement. “All we need is a vase of flowers.”
    “I’ll go pick them,” Tomi said, and they both laughed. There were no flowers growing in this dry dirt!
    By the time Hiro and Roy returned, Tomi and Mom had unpacked the suitcases. Tomi had picked up a handful of bent nails from the pile of discarded lumber and used the heel of her shoe to pound them into the wall. And now the four of them hung the clothes on the nails. “You see, we don’t have to go through a closet to choose our clothes. They are right there on the wall where we can see them,” Mom said.
    “But I only have two shirts, and I’m wearing one,” Hiro pointed out.
    “Even easier,” Mom said. She turned to Roy. “There are knotholes in the wall. You can see sunlight through them. That’s why there’s so much dust. You find a cook and tellhim we want tin can lids to nail over the holes.”
    Tomi didn’t know why Mom seemed so happy. Maybe it was that they were finally away from the racetrack, or perhaps it was that she was settling into a “home.” She couldn’t stop the family from being evacuated, but she and Tomi could arrange the room any way they wanted.
    It struck Tomi then that Mom had changed a little just in the months since Pop was arrested. She had always done what everyone else wanted. Now for the first time in her life, she was in charge. Maybe something good had come from the evacuation. It wasn’t much. Were there other good changes? Tomi would look for them.

1942 | CHAPTER SIX
    RICE and FRUIT COCKTAIL

    THE food wasn’t much better at Tallgrass than it had been at Santa Anita. There was something called Spam that came in a can and was sliced and fried. Tomi thought the bottom of her shoe would taste better. The only fish was tuna fish, which came from a can, too. Instead of fresh vegetables, there were canned beans and peas. And dessert was rice with syrupy fruit cocktail poured over it.
    “This is not good food. I will talk to the cooks about it,” Mom said as she looked over her plate of macaroni and cheese.
    “You will?” Hiro asked.
    Tomi shoved him with her elbow. She liked this new Mom. The old one never would have complained, but now Mom was quick to tell someone in charge when thingswere wrong. She demanded lumber so that Roy could build shelves in their apartment and a table and chairs. She complained about the bathrooms. “Ladies need privacy,” she said, after she visited the latrine. The toilets were in a big room, with no partitions around them. Some women carried pieces of cardboard