Returning, I sit on the bench at the foot of the bed and pat the spot beside me, like I would do at home with Joy. Seeming grateful for the invitation, Anne comes right over and sits close enough beside me that our arms touch. And there’s a memory here, too.

For an instant, we’re conspirators again. I whisper, “Remember ganging up on Margo?”

She whispers back, “Oh yeah.” We’re both eyeing the closed hatch. “She’d be up there ordering us around, and we’d sit here so quiet, so quiet that she’d finally come to the door and look down and see us and hit the roof that we hadn’t already come back with her peanut butter Triscuits.”

“We’d just stare up at her.”

“It took two of us to defy her.”

“She wasn’t always bad.”

“She was imperious.”

“And where did she get that?” I ask, the words slipping out before I can think better of it.

Anne angles away to face me. “Don’t blame Dad. If he was imperious, it was because Mom needed direction. Mom was a ditz.”

“Only when she was with Dad. He didn’t take kindly to competent women.”

“But he has a heart, Mal. He suffered when the family broke apart. He’s been lonely.”

There are a number of things I might say to that, the first involving my mother, who did not need direction. She proved that ten times over after the divorce. She was a strong woman held down by an authoritarian thumb. Why she allowed it was another of the questions I wanted to ask, but that would take us off topic.

Levelly, I say, “I’m just trying to explain why Margo grew to be forceful. She wasn’t the boy Dad wanted, but he pushed her to accomplish. When she refused to go into law, there was a huge scene. Remember?”

“It wasn’t a huge scene. It was a discussion. He was perfectly reasonable. He said she had choices, and he ended it by saying she should do what she wants.”

Those might have been the words, but the tone was something else. I remember anger and shouting. I remember a level of hostility that drove me from the living room and had me hiding in my bedroom for hours. But that was me. I hated fights. Margo welcomed them, and Anne? Anne was always able to simply tune out the bad.

“I’m just saying,” I try to explain, since Margo isn’t here to defend herself, “that in some regards, she had it worse than we did. His expectations for her were high.”

Anne gives a twisted smile. “Oh yeah. Expectations. He had none for me. That made it easy.”

She tosses off the statement like it’s a good thing, but I wonder. The lightness is a cover for what sounds like hurt. Either that’s new, or I was simply too wound up in my own thoughts to see it before.