“Well, right, but…I never could have. Whereas it seems like you had the option.”

Joan gazed down at the remains of her meal. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

Vanessa looked at her, inviting her to explain.

“Marrying Adam Hawkins and being a wife? Waiting at home and making dinner every night? My mom is so good at that stuff, but I never looked at her and saw myself. I know that hurt her feelings. I know that me choosing a different life didn’t quite make sense to her at first. But I think choosing that other life, her life, would have been very hard. I think it would have been one of the hardest things I’d had to do. I chose the only life I knew how to choose.”

“I was trying to compliment you,” Vanessa said. “But you look insulted.”

Joan shook her head. “No, I just…Don’t make it out like life in the suburbs is easy. Life’s not easy for anybody, first of all. And second of all, I’ve never fit in there. That life, in particular, would not have been natural for me at all.”

Joan could feel Vanessa studying her face. But then Vanessa pulled back and put her arm on the back of her chair. She sat slumped ever so slightly, with her knees apart. When she sat like this in bars or buses, Joan cringed a bit.

“Sometimes I think you and I are having one conversation and then I realize we’ve been having an entirely different one the whole time, you know that?” Vanessa asked.

“No,” Joan said. “I think we’re on the same page.”

Vanessa considered this. “I admire you,” she said finally.

Joan scoffed. “That’s a little silly.”

“Why is that silly?”

“Because you’re just as accomplished as me. In some ways more so.”

Vanessa leaned forward. “I can fly a plane better than you. Fix a plane better than you.”

“See? There you go.”

“But I can’t play the piano the way you do.”

Joan waved her off.

“You can try to deny it, but I’ve heard you play,” she said.

Joan caught her eye and then looked away.

“And I don’t know the history of the stars. Or how to take care of a kid—stock my kitchen with food they’d like and say all the right things, like you do with Frances. Lord knows, I can’t draw at all,” she said.

“Yeah, how terribly accomplished of me. I doodle.”

“Why are you calling them doodles? Why are you doing that? All I’m trying to tell you is that I’ve only ever really loved one thing. Being in the sky. But I look at you, and you are so curious about everything. Not just about the planets and galaxies and the stars. But Earth. About the people on it. That’s what I admire.”

“My curiosity?”