But when I scream back at her she’s gone and the house almost shakes with the sickening quiet, and my head drops down again and I want to fall onto the living-room floor until I hear her whisper, “Posture,” gently, in that singsong way she uses when she knows what she’s saying is a pain in the ass but she has to say it anyway.

“I know, I know.” I think I’m standing up straight.

I put the chicken on a board.

“Don’t you dare start before you preheat the oven.”

Three hundred fifty degrees. Mom fake-frowns at my impatience, so I lower it to 325. I like the click when the oven light switches on; I like the sound the fan makes. The air feels less empty; I lean my head back and listen.

Then Lolly’s there and she claps her hands at me. She’s right—I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing. This is how accidents happen. This is how absentminded little girls accidentally burn the house down.

“Leave her alone, Mom. She knows what she’s doing. My girl has always been so capable.”

I don’t know whose side to take, so I leave them to bicker and turn on the exhaust fan and open the windows because I know that Lolly hates it when I fill her house with cooking smells.

The horn from the afternoon boat blows in. The three of them could be coming back, all three could be back here in another twenty minutes, and I’ll have dinner in the oven and Mom will be proud because she’s the one who taught me about tarragon and Lolly will be happy that I remembered to open the windows and turn on the fan and my dad will do that thing he does where he says that the food needs something, so he has to keep tasting it, because he’s still not sure and he just keeps taking bites with this fake-confused look on his face until he’s eaten his entire plate of food, because no matter how cool you used to be, once you become a dad you automatically develop some dorky, embarrassing spiel that’s so cute that no one can tell you to fuck off and stop being so goddamn goofy.

“You wouldn’t talk to your father like that anyway, would you?”

That has to be Lolly, the way everything she says is a question and an assumption and an instruction, but her voice is a lot like my mother’s and I wonder if it’s also a lot like mine, so I say, “Which one of you does my voice sound like? When I talk, when I say things out loud, does my voice sound like yours? Or yours?”

“It’s like mine. You take after me exactly.”

“No, I think she’s equally dissimilar from both of us.”