“Do you want me to touch your belly?” We start moving forward again. “Is it for good luck?”

“Some people are interested in the miracle of childbirth.”

We talk the way sisters talk, I think. Even as we needle each other, there is a kind of enjoyment in it, perhaps in the knowledge that we are playing out a larger conversation that all sisters must have. Little lighthearted barbs intended to prick but not sting, to rile up one another; the common lexicon of women bound by blood. Yes, the way sisters talk to each other—for sisters, above anyone on earth, must become fluent in this passive-aggressive language.

But I won’t admit that here in the middle of the fluorescent grocery store, amid shelves of milk and butter, my sister is riling me up the way only she knows how to.

I grip the cart and sigh. “I’m glad you’re happy. But can’t you just enjoy your happiness without needing me to feel it, too?”

“Happy?” she breathes, and I cannot tell if she is truly wounded or if she is merely behaving so to call out my too-overt aggression; there is a fine balancing act that must be maintained to keep the order of politeness and cruelty intact. “Happy? You think I’m happy? My husband and I separated and I’m almost eight months pregnant. How can I be happy?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, even though I’m not sure if I really am, and I wonder, if I’m not sorry, whether that makes me a terrible person.

I have become more conscious now of the people around us doing their own shopping, and I get the feeling they are all looking at me from the corners of their eyes. They are looking at me because I have brought attention to myself in being rude to my sister, and then retreating into that docile and pathetic apology. They have identified us as Wakefields and now are thinking their nasty thoughts. This is why I move swiftly and smoothly through the store when I come alone, like a leopard; as much as I like to listen to the people chirp, I want also to be invisible. Being seen makes me uncomfortable. I look around at all the flat-eyed shoppers as we go, and I think to myself, this town is an angry, dismal blight of a place, and I can’t pretend to like it anymore.

The truth is that I know Elizabeth will be fine whether I coddle her with niceness or not. It seems a formality to be nice for niceness’ sake. The social convention doesn’t draw actual love or care out of us; it only filters out the ugliness, as if to say that because we cannot see it, it must not be there.

And I know Elizabeth will be a good mother without having to sycophantically remind her of that. She knows how to do the right things. She took care of me, after all, when I was too young to realize our mother had failed to. Now she reads baby books and goes to prenatal classes and gushes all the usual pregnancy clichés as if they have become fresh in her mouth. When the baby comes, she will take one look at him and no matter how blood-bathed and wrinkled he is, she will call him perfect, precious, beautiful. She will take a thousand identical pictures of him and post every last one online. She will never abandon him like she abandoned me. She knows she will immediately love this creature that percolated in her womb for nine months because he belongs to her.