Sally was actually shaking. I could tell, because the table had one leg shorter than the others, and it was sort of buzzing against the floor as she sat there. She said, “I told him I’d have to check it out with you.” I could barely hear her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine.” Sally got up and came around the table and she hugged me, and now I couldn’t tell which one of us was trembling. She whispered into my hair, “Jenny, he’s a good, good man—he is, baby, you’d know it if you ever just talked to him for five minutes. He’s kind, and he’s funny, and I feel like myself when I’m with him. I’ve never felt that way with anybody, never, I never have.” Then she grinned at me, looking like a little kid again, and said, “Well, present company excepted, natch.” Which was a nice thing to say, but silly, too, because she knew better. We got on well enough most days, but not the way she was talking about. I only felt really like myself with Mister Cat, back then. Back before Tamsin.

Anyway, Sally kept hugging me and going on about Evan, and I just kept standing there, waiting to feel something besides numb. My breath was sort of hardening in my chest, like the asthma attacks I used to get when I was little. But I wasn’t wheezing or anything—it was more like things inside me pushing up all close together, huddling together. When I did finally manage to speak, it sounded like somebody else, somebody far away, nobody I knew. I said, “Are you going to have to go to England? With him?”

The way Sally looked at me was like that moment in a cartoon where the fox or the coyote runs straight off the cliff and doesn’t know it right away, but just keeps on running in the air. She said slowly, like a question, “Well, honey, sure, of course we are,” and then her eyes got all wet again, so now of course she couldn’t talk for a bit. I gave her my wad of Kleenex, because to this day she absolutely never has one—I don’t know how she manages. She blew her nose and grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me a little. “Baby,” she said. “Baby, did you think I was just going to walk off and leave you? Don’t you know I wouldn’t go anywhere without you, not for Evan McHugh, not for anybody? Don’t you know that?” Her voice sounded weird, too, like a cartoon voice.

“Why can’t he just move here?” I mumbled it, the way I still do when I can’t not say something, but I don’t really want people to hear me, especially the one I’m saying it to. Meena says I’ve practically quit doing that, but I know I haven’t.

“Honey, that’s where his work is,” Sally said. God, I remember it used to drive me wild that she’d never talk about Evan’s job, it always had to be his work. “I can do what I do anywhere, but Evan’s got to be in England, in London. Besides, the boys are there, Tony and Julian, they’re in school—”

“Well, I’m in school, too,” I said. “In case you didn’t notice.” Mister Cat jumped down from the top of the refrigerator and stalked across the table to me with his legs all stiff, doing his Frankenstein-cat number. I hadn’t seen him on the refrigerator, but Mister Cat’s always there or gone, he’s never anywhere in between. That’s how I wanted to be, that’s what I mean about being invisible. Most black cats are really a kind of red-brown underneath, if you see them in the right light, but Mister Cat’s black right through, even though he’s half-Siamese. “Black to the bone,” my friend Marta Velez used to say. He stood up and put his paws around my neck, and I could feel him purring without a sound, the way he always does. He smelled like warm toast—dark, dark toast, when you get it out just right, just before it burns.

“You could take him with you,” Sally said, really quickly, as though I didn’t know it. “He’d have to wait out quarantine, but that’s just a month, I think.” She looked at me sideways again. She said, “You know, I had this crazy idea you might actually be glad to start a whole different life somewhere else—another country, new school, new people, new friends, new ways of doing things. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not as though you’ve been having such a great time this last year or two—”

And I just lost it right there, I have to write it exactly like that, I just went up in smoke. I didn’t know it was going to happen until I heard that faraway voice screaming at her, “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t have the greatest life in the world right now, but I’m used to it, you ever think about that? And I know I’ve only got a couple of friends, and they’re even weirder than I am, but I know them, and I don’t want to start everything all over in some shitty, snobby place where it rains all the damn time and they make you wear uniforms.” Sally was trying to interrupt, and Mister Cat was looking at me and flicking his tail, the way he still does when I’m not being cool like him. I just kept going, “It’s fine, it’s okay, I’ll move in with Marta, or Norris or somebody, I’ll call Norris right now.” And I grabbed up the phone, and the receiver slipped right out of my hands, they were so shaky and sweaty. It just made me crazier. I told her, “Don’t worry about me. You go to England, that’s fine, have a nice life. Say hello to the boys, okay?”

And I banged the phone back down, and then I did head for my room, and the door was already slamming while she was still yelling something about finally getting me away from my damn druggy friends. Mister Cat ran in right after me—someday he’s going to get nailed, I keep telling him—and jumped up on the bed, and we just lay there for I don’t know how long, hours. The Gluckstein Diet.

I guess I must have cried a little bit, but not very much. I’m really not a big crier. Mainly I lay there with Mister Cat on my chest and started reviewing my options. That’s something Norris used to say all the time—how when you’re in a bad place and confused and not sure which way to turn, the best thing is to get yourself quiet and think really coldly about your options, your choices, even if they’re all shitty, until you can figure out which one’s the least shiny of the bunch. Of course, when Norris talks about options, he mostly means a better contract, or a bigger dressing room, or a first-class ticket instead of flying business class. Whoever thought artists were a lot of dreamy twits with no clue about money never met my father.

My options narrowed down in a hurry. Marta would have been great, but I knew she didn’t even have enough room for herself, with five other kids in the family. Unlike Sally, who’s an only child, and Norris, who’s got the one sister way up in Riverdale, Aunt Marcelia. She’s got a daughter, too, my cousin Barbara, and we were always supposed to be lifelong buddies, but the first time we met, when we were maybe two years old, we tried to beat each other to death with our toy fire engines, and it’s been downhill from there. I still can’t believe we’re cousins. Somebody’s lying.

So in about a minute and a half it was Norris or nobody. Something I should put in here is that I like my father. Sally always says, “That’s because you weren’t married to him,” but what’s funny is that I know Norris a lot better than she ever did. As much time as she’s spent with show people, she’s never understood, they’re real, they’re just not real all the time. Norris really likes having a daughter, he likes telling people about me, or calling me up—the way he still does now, when he’s singing in London—and saying, “Hey, kid, it’s your old man, you want to come down to the wicked city and hang out?” Only he’d be a lot happier if I were electric or electronic, something with a cord he could plug in or a remote he could turn on and off. It’s just Norris, that’s how he is with everybody. Maybe he’d have been different with me if we lived together, I don’t know. He left when I was eight.