“Not sure, exactly. Had something to do with my mom, maybe. It’s a long story though, I bet.” I tried to summon some memory of Lu’s mother. I knew we’d lived with her until Lu met Dave, and I was a couple of years old then. I thought I might remember some half-heard voice that may have been hers, but then again, it might have been somebody else. I couldn’t remember seeing her at Malachi’s trial, and even my rarely seen aunt Michelle had come out for that one. “I think my grandmother’s still alive, but I’m not sure we’d go to her funeral if she had one. I don’t think she takes much interest in us, anyway, and I guess it’s mutual.”

“Oh.”

Anne, who was sitting beside Cora on the other side of the table, began to sniffle. “I miss my grandma. I go to her place after school twice a week while my mom’s at work.”

We didn’t pretend not to stare as she started crying again, but at least we didn’t laugh, and Cora handed her a napkin. “That’s sweet that you’re so close,” she said while Anne blew her nose. “But I bet she hopes you’re having a good time. You’re only going to be here two weeks, and then you can go home.”

“Two whole weeks,” Anne echoed mournfully, and then it was my turn to hand her a napkin.

“Geez, honey. Suck it up.”

“That’s not very nice,” Lisa said without looking at me. She was too busy making sure her peas were lined up in tidy rows to raise her eyes and scold me in earnest, which was fine. It had been four hours, and I’d already figured out that it didn’t matter how rude or gentle you were with Anne, she was going to cry anyway and there wasn’t much you could do to improve or worsen the situation.

“It’s okay,” Anne said behind her improvised tissue.

“What about you?” Cora asked Lisa, who was deeply engrossed in her vegetable arrangement. “Why do you always do that thing where you have to make everything look just right?”

“Yeah, that’s way weirder than Anne’s crying,” I agreed, and I peered over Lisa’s shoulder, as if getting a closer look at her edible artwork would cause it to make more sense.

She elbowed me away without any real malice. “I like it this way.”

I accepted the explanation, but I couldn’t withhold judgment. “Bizarre,” I concluded, and even Anne managed to nod through the snot to agree.

“I don’t care,” Lisa replied. Something about the way she said it made me believe her. That only made it stranger, so far as I was concerned, but at the same time it made it more tolerable too. At least I didn’t have to feel sorry for her.