You turn to the counter to make your coffee. Looking at her is like looking at a photograph of yourself taken too long ago to remember the circumstances of it, recognizing yourself there, but being unable to recall ever inhabiting that moment. That’s more words than you ever put to a photograph of yourself, but of course it’s different when the uncanny feeling is made flesh, taking up room and air. Picking at her cuticles like you still pick at your cuticles, though you have the self-control now to stop before they bleed. She, tugging a pale strip of skin between her front teeth, autocannibalistic, does not. It’s a kind of emotional headache, a knot of buzzing tightness forming at the base of your throat where your collarbones notch. You put your eyes back on the coffee grounds.

“I don’t have time for this today,” you tell her. “You’re going to have to take the train to Mom’s.”

“I hate the train.”

“I know.” You put your coffee down, and go and get a banana. There’s nothing else breakfasty around, you’ve been putting off shopping. The Cheerios aren’t looking appealing.

“What do you have to do anyway?”

“Work. It’s Thursday.” That might be a real headache building in addition to the existential one; stress. It’s only seven-fifteen. You’re not late yet, though you are starting to fall behind, standing in the doorway half-dressed and without your hair brushed.

Maura raises a two-finger gun to her forehead, mimes pulling the trigger. “That’s not funny,” you reprimand her. It just sort of feels like you should.

* * *

It took you until Maura’s third reprise in your life to realize that she came from your mother and not from some glitch in your own connection with reality. Your mother was publishing infrequently back then; you’ve heard it takes a while to get a leg up in publishing. And you were twenty-one, more than halfway to twenty-two, closing out the semester with straight As for the first time in your life and with a winter internship lined up helping to organize fundraisers at the local Planned Parenthood. When you took a step back from your life and looked at it, it was almost like you’d become an adult.