When I bring out the tea, Mother and Elizabeth have settled themselves in the drawing room. All these rooms have old names. If it were a modern home, there likely would be only the living, the dining, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the bedrooms; but here in this monstrosity of a manse, built piecemeal over the course of many years in which the previous owners—well, my ancestors, mad, the lot of them—kept adding on as if to confuse the ghosts that live here, there are simply too many rooms not to have names for each of them, or else how would you ever find each other? That is why this old dark maze has also a parlor, a drawing room, a billiards room, a library, a stone tower room, a reading room, a den, and the Rose Room, named—shall I hazard a guess?—for the putrid floral carpet and the pink velvet draperies, and all the old ornate furniture in there that has been around, good lord, since the Victorian era.

When I return with the tea, my mother is asking my sister the particulars of her departure from her husband, but Elizabeth is uncharacteristically tight-lipped on the matter. True to form, however, with her attentive listeners, she proceeds to divulge a litany of general complaints: “He never wanted to get married—you remember, he dragged his feet like a child. He didn’t want to be a father. Or he could never decide. He blamed me for getting pregnant.” Angry tears glisten and run over. “He said I should have gotten an abortion!”

“That man,” says my mother, shaking her head. “Well, it’s good you came home. You stay as long as you like. Sam, won’t it be nice to have your sister here? And a baby!” Her eyes catch on Elizabeth, whose face is a mask of despair. “You know, Lizzie, this might be a blessing in disguise. Why don’t I consult the cards?”

“God, Mom, no,” groans Elizabeth. “Can’t we behave like normal people for once?”

Mother hides her frown behind the mug of chamomile. “Needs lemon.” She bustles off to the kitchen, leaving us alone, two strangers who once spent sixteen years of our lives together, with only each other for companionship in this lonely place.

“How long, you think, before she asks to read my palm?” Elizabeth murmurs.

“Well, it won’t hurt if you just let her.”

“What else should I have expected?” she says, more to herself than to me. She has a habit of speaking to herself aloud in front of me as if I’m not there, but also with the full intention of me hearing whatever it is she wants to say. If not, she would just think it like the rest of us.

“So,” she says, as if realizing we are alone, now, for the first time since I left her house after my brief stay with her and Don and moved back here.

As happens sometimes with sisters, once we were adults and no longer lived in the same house, Elizabeth and I became fond friends, with the kind of connection fostered only between turbulent sisters. We met up regularly for coffee and gossip, or lunch while reading movie reviews, or drinks and card games.