“What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever done?” I inquire. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“I helped catch someone. You’ve always been the crime buster, Kay. And I’m just this overblown pretty woman who’s doing the best she can to keep her shit together while I just get damn older all the time. I mean look at me. No matter what I do.”

I start to tell her to cut out the tanning booths. Her skin looks spray-painted tan, but I don’t go there. She doesn’t need my criticism, and maybe I’m not the only one who’s pathologically insecure but doesn’t show it most of the time.

“I’ll tell you what’s missing.” I set down my coffee on the bedside table. “If you go into the closet and open the first cabinet on the left, you’ll find something special I keep down here for rainy mornings just like this one.”

“A joint would be nice,” she says.

“A very nice Irish whiskey,” I reply. “Go on in there and pour us two shots. Then we’ll talk as long as you don’t ask me anything you shouldn’t.”

I watch my sister walk into the big cedar-lined closet, and I hear her going into the cabinet and pulling the cork out of the bottle.

“We should get Mom on the phone this morning. Both of us,” I say as Dorothy returns.

“Not unless she puts her hearing aids in. I’m tired of yelling.” She sets the shot of whiskey by my coffee. “You’re never around. In fact you never have been ever since you left for college. So I’ve been on my own with her. And now I’m the one she picks on.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“The book business not being what it was? Kids don’t want to read what I write, not this day and age.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I mean let’s face it. I’m not going to be invited to Comic Con.” My sister looks rather crushed.

“Never say never.” I taste the whiskey and it’s warm going down, warmer than the hot coffee but in a different way. “We spend our lives reinventing ourselves, Dorothy. I never knew that until I got a little older and wiser.”

“Well our mother’s decided I’m the failed one. It used to be you because of your divorce and no kids, and then you decided to be a doctor to dead people so you don’t have to worry about losing patients, about them dying on you.”

“I’m sure that’s what mother says.” I reach for my coffee.

“That and getting involved with a married man.”