“I’m pleased for you, Tina. I really am.”

Tina poked at her salad as though a mouse might be hiding in it, then asked, “Do you think I lead a shallow life?”

“Does it matter?”

“That I lead a shallow life?”

“No, if I think you do. I don’t worry about your opinion of my life, Tina. Each of us is responsible for her own happiness, right?”

“That’s what Daddy used to say.” She smiled and looked down at her lap.

I have an opinion of forty-four-year-old women who still call their fathers Daddy. “He used to say a lot of things, most of them true.”

She nodded. “Do you think Mother still misses him?”

“I think,” I said, “that after all these years, she misses not being able to speak more than she misses our father.”

I pushed my plate away, and both of us sat in silence until Tina began talking about Mel again.

“He’s worried about you, did I say that? Mel, I mean. He’s really concerned about this guy who was in the garden shed, watching you.”

“Or watching Gabe.”

Tina blinked. “Why would he be watching Gabe?”

“For god’s sake, Tina, they can get married now.”

Tina said, “Oh.” Then, “Anyway, Mel was telling me that he’s checking the records for confirmed perverts who live on the beach strip. You know, people who’ve been convicted of doing what this guy was doing, and other stuff. So far he’s come up with over a dozen. Listen, there can’t be more than eight hundred, a thousand people living there, and at least a dozen are convicted perverts. Now you’re all alone and—”

“I’ll buy a big dog.”

Tina returned to her food. “Maybe you should just start getting a little more friendly with Mel again.” She looked up, saw the expression on my face, and said, “I mean, when all of this is over, of course. This stuff with your husband. You know, maybe six months, a year from now. Damn.” She put her hand on mine and looked away, embarrassed.

WE SAT WITH MOTHER FOR AN HOUR, Tina and I answering questions she wrote in her lovely cursive penmanship on the blackboard. Did Gabe shoot himself? she wanted to know, and I said, “Absolutely not.”

“She’s either crying or making wisecracks,” Tina told Mother about me, and Mother smiled and wrote, As long as she’s making jokes, she’s okay. That’s one reason I love my mother: she knows me better than anyone else.

When we ran out of things to say and write, Tina and I remained to watch television with her. After suffering her stroke, whenever Mother tried to speak and could not she would cry. This lasted a couple of months. Mother did not stop trying to speak, but she stopped crying over it. Instead, she would get angry at the words she formed but could not deliver. She would make a fist, bringing it down on her knee or on the table, if she were sitting at one, then stare into space, biting her lip. I loved her for that. I loved her for getting angry at the unfairness of life. It proved what I have known all my life, that I am my mother’s child, and maybe Tina is the adopted one.

Mother did not become angry this time. She looked from Tina to me and back again, as though trying to choose between us. Or, and this chilled me, trying to remember exactly who we were and why we were in her room.

When we left, Tina hugged her briefly. I held on to her longer. Then I leaned back to look into her eyes. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

She frowned, pointed at her lips, and shook her head.

“I know you can’t speak,” I said. “But you know us, right? Tina and me?”

She nodded, then pulled me to her again.

“HOW LONG DO YOU THINK MOTHER HAS?” Tina asked on the way back to my house.

I was driving. “Until what?”

“Until the next stroke, the one that’ll kill her.”

“Jesus, Tina.”

“Don’t get angry with me. It’s a legitimate question. Andrew told me that when someone Mother’s age has a stroke like that, she’ll have another, and we had better expect it. The difference between you and me is that I’m a realist and you’re a dreamer.”

“Yeah, well, the reality is that my husband’s dead and yours isn’t.”

“Which reminds me. I should call Andrew.”

She pulled the smallest cell phone I had ever seen out of her purse and dialed it, right there in the car. “Got his voice mail,” she said. We were crossing the lift bridge over the canal, the tires growling against the textured steel road surface. When we were children, crossing the bridge in Dad’s car, he would tell us a troll lived under the bridge, and the troll grew angry whenever anyone drove over him, and it was the troll we heard growling, not our tires on the rough steel. I smiled at the memory and would have mentioned it to Tina, something we could share between us, but she was continuing her extended conversation with her absent husband.

“… know you’re busy, but I want you to look at that dining-room suite I mentioned at Dorsey’s. I left you a note on it—did you get the note? Stop in on your way home from the hospital tonight. I think we should have it for Thanksgiving, but it may be a special order, so we should do something about it now, all right? Josie says hello. She’s driving, or I would hand her the telephone. She’s bearing up so well, the sweetheart, and I’ll give her your love. Call me when you get time, and speak to the landscapers, will you? They still haven’t trimmed the hedge at the back the way I like it. You’re going to have to give them hell, Andrew. You’re too nice to them. I think we should change them, the maintenance people, I mean.”

She pecked a few kisses into the telephone and snapped it shut just as we pulled into the driveway. I switched off the engine and lights and sat staring at the darkened house and the eastern sky behind it, over the lake. The high clouds were lit in that dying pink shade of summer dusk.

Tina spoke my name twice before I looked at her.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About …” She waved at the house. “This. Your life. You stayed home while Gabe worked, right? Except for afternoons doing the books where Mother lives?”

“That’s how Gabe wanted it,” I said. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the house, Tina trailing me. “And so did I. We paid cash for the house—”

“Why?” Tina asked.

“It didn’t take that much money. Real estate prices here are cheap. You can probably buy our house for the same price you’d pay for a parking spot in Vancouver.”

I unlocked the front door, tossed the keys on a table, and turned to face Tina.

“Why didn’t Gabe want you to work?” Tina asked. “At a full-time job?”

I didn’t like her tone. “Hey, I didn’t want to work either. Not full-time. I’d been fired from my job just after we moved here—”

“Is that when you worked at the veterinarian’s?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“And you told some woman who brought her little dog into the animal hospital that the dumbest bitch in the room wasn’t the one with four legs and an infected paw but the one wearing the cheap dress and the dumb hairdo?” She’d always enjoyed telling that story. I’d assumed she was proud of her little sister’s wit. Now I thought it was something else, and it made me angry.

“What the hell, Tina?” I said. “You haven’t worked a day since you married Andrew, you tramp.”

“Of course not!” she shouted. “Unlike you, I have social commitments.” That almost inspired me to pour turpentine into her underwear again, this time while she was wearing it, but just then the telephone rang. I seized it as an opportunity to end the battle, or maybe as a weapon, and barked, “Hello!”

“Josie?” It was Dewey. “Should I call some other time?”

“Yes,” I said, then “No,” because this seemed like a good way for Tina and I to stop arguing gracefully. “Hi, Dewey,” I said and looked across at Tina, who mouthed “Dewey?”

“I’ve been reading about Gabe and you in the papers,” Dewey said, “and feeling terrible, but I didn’t want to make a pest of myself, you know, unless you wanted to see me.”