I'm not convinced we need this present moment in the shower (here or anywhere else in the story). The shower still has emphasis in the past without it, so these present moments amount to you describing a girl taking a shower. Not exactly the story's most page-turning moments.

Okay, so Mara is seven. Maybe reveal this tidbit sooner.

Another shift to the mother's perspective.

I don't know what this looks like.

How old is she? She's seeming younger and younger.

"Seemed" is an odd choice when we've been inside Mara's head all along.

This seems like a shift to the mother's perspective, like we're seeing the watch through her eyes whereas everything until now has been third person limited focused on Mara.

Annoying to read but at least you only did it with the one word.

Why this shift back to the ritual that was abandoned earlier by the mother?

Now the mom is taking over-long showers? Odd behavior.

Try to avoid adverbs.

We'd been in the past so long I'd forgotten about the present moment in the shower. Is the shower conceit necessary to the story?

What about him is making her feel this way? Give the reader something concrete to work with.

That the dinner is for this purpose is obvious to the reader by this point. Maybe there's someway you could make this macro mystery of the story more interesting?

Again my question arises of how the mother makes money in general. There's no hint of the mother's day-to-day life outside of the dates and her sleeping late. To me, it makes the mother seem more one dimensional than she should be.

How does the mother make her money? She's sleeping through the days (from having nights out with a man, I'm assuming), so I'm left wondering how much time is spent at an actual job.

Breaking the routine sends off warning bells. Mama's about to introduce that new man of hers.

I'm having trouble locating the now of the story. Mara's in the shower but we haven't been grounded at all. I don't know how old Mara is now compared to then (how much time has passed).

Disturbing. The mother is approaching dangerous levels of neglect.

She doesn't even have fuzzy memories of what he looked like? Poor kid.

This makes me long for the father to be present in some undead fashion. But then, I suppose the concept of Heaven is undead in its own right...

I don't believe this line from the mother and Mara shouldn't either. The mother's own care is already slipping just from thinking about finding a new man.

Transference to an object. Good.

Seems to be far too blunt to say to a child. We've heard nothing of the father until this point or about a lack of a father, so this is also the first point in the narrative where the reader understands Mara has lost her father somehow.

This shift in the mother seems sudden. Too sudden perhaps. Would all their childish games disappear all at once? Or would the mother gradually pull away from the child?

Makes me thinking they're working in the outdoors in some capacity.

Who is the "she" here?

Cute way to quickly build the relationship between the two.

Icy water? The shower's not actually spitting out ice with the water, is it?

Perhaps consider "skin" instead of "body" here with the verb "penetrate." Penetrate used with body makes me thing of something far more destructive than needles; knives for example.

I like the sentiment this ends on, but I'm not sold on the narrator believing this sentiment here at the end. All that's been said is that her grandmother drinks a lot, something the narrator already knows full well. I could still see her being offended by an outsider calling attention to the drinking, but I don't know that I buy the narrator accepting her grandmother's questionable home after this experience with Felicia. More needs to happen at Felicia's home, I think. More to alienate her from this side of the fence she's never visited before but has always romanticized.

Show this with a line of imagery?

This feels like foreshadowing to me. I'm expecting Felicia's living situation to somehow be worse than the narrator's.

I'm left wondering why this change occurs. The grandmother denying visits is the status quo. Why is she reversing her decision here? Seems important since the visit is the crux of the story.

Make this more descriptive? "Minimal" is so abstract.

I'm noticing a pattern of starting sentence with gerunds. Maybe try to vary the structure of sentences more.

Pulls me away from the child narrator's voice.

Such a great caretaker.

I'm wanting more imagery of the fence here considering how central it is to the piece.