I squeeze her hand. “No, babe. It would have happened anyway. It needed to happen. And it was good to find the gun.”

“Good? There’s nothing good about a gun. And now it’s gone, but Anne hates us.”

I jiggle her hand. “She doesn’t hate us.”

“The things she said—”

“She was angry.”

“Bastard daughter?”

Lifting my head, I squint toward my cell. “What time is it?” The sun is well up. I hear gulls.

“Seven.”

“I can’t do this at seven,” I breathe, sinking back as the details of last night’s fight pinch at my mind.

“But what do we do now?” Joy repeats with even greater urgency. “Do we stay or leave? Do we take Papa down to the shop? I don’t know if I want to be with Anne if she’s going to be that ugly. How can sisters treat sisters like that?”

“Sisters are people first,” I say. No, not the discussion I want to get into now, but I am my daughter’s mother, and the buck stops here. More to the point, knowing her as I do, this daughter won’t let it go. “Sisters are related, not identical. They have different personalities and different life experiences.”

“But you grew up together. You lived in this house together as many years as you lived away. You ate the same food and celebrated the same holidays. You rode in the backseat of Papa’s old wooden Jeep, and you ganged up on him. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

It did. Absolutely. But shit happens. It’s part of life. How to prepare her for that? How to explain family angst in a way that doesn’t put her off family altogether? My greatest dread in conceiving Joy as I did and raising her alone isn’t in not having back-up when we both have the flu. It’s in passing on the belief that living alone is best.

“Family can be a challenge,” I say, “but the alternative is worse. That’s why we’re here, Joy. My sisters and I experienced life together but differently, and we’ve been apart for twenty years. What you’re seeing now is a … rapprochement.”

She knows the word. She singled it out of a book not a month ago. We discussed its meaning, as well as the beauty of the sound. Ra-proche-ment. Soft proche, French ment.

I had hoped the memory would lift her spirits, but she pouts. “A rapprochement is happy. This isn’t.”

“It will be. ‘The best way out is always through,’ Robert Frost says.”

“I know, Mom. You’ve told me a gazillion times, but you didn’t say through meant war.”

“It isn’t war. It’s negotiation.”