“I have to go babysit. Will you call me at the Bouchers’ when she gets here?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me in the mirror. I didn’t understand her putting on her punk face when she wasn’t going anywhere.

I went down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was hardly anything in it. My mother always kept the bread in the crisper drawer so it wouldn’t go stale. I took out a slice and a stick of butter to spread on it. The bread was cold, and I could barely chew. I thought for a moment I might be sick. “The Worrier,” Gwen had called me. It was true. I worried about everything. When everyone else climbed the fence of the swim club to go skinny-dipping, I stayed outside, keeping watch on the road, in case they set off the alarm or a neighbor reported them to the police. When Marie snuck out the window at night, I couldn’t sleep until she was back, imagining all the bad things that could happen to her, listening for my mother in the hallway. Even before Dad died, I was already like this. My mother had once bought us each a poster. Mine was a picture of a lion cub wailing with a wide-open mouth. “Stop worrying,” it read. “The world is sad enough without your woe.”

For Marie she’d bought a poster of cartoon animals playing musical instruments, with the line “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

Ellen had gotten “Don’t take the fun out of dysfunctional.”

I threw the bread in the trash. I couldn’t swallow it.

In the rec room, Beatrice was folding the laundry on the couch, and Thomas was vacuuming. They had started the chores Ellen had been told to do. Beatrice was seven, five years younger than Ellen and seven years younger than me. Ellen was right, she was coddled by our mom—by all of us, actually—but she wasn’t a brat, and she didn’t like being separated out. I sat next to her on the couch and started folding a school shirt.

“I don’t know why Ellen was so mad at me.” Beatrice looked up. There was a gaping space in her mouth where she had lost two teeth. Her wavy hair was pulled into fat bunches just behind her ears.

“She wasn’t mad at you. It’s not your fault, Bea.”

“What if she can’t find her way or gets hit by a car?”

“She’ll be fine. We’re used to going around the mountain in the dark. She knows the roads. Help Marie look out for her, okay?” Beatrice nodded.

Thomas shouted over the vacuum cleaner: “Stop slacking on the job! Get folding. Hup, two, three, four.” Bea brightened and started rolling matched socks together.