When I was little, I tried to color my hair black with a marker. It didn’t work. The good thing about Dad being a direct descendant of a Puritan on the Mayflower is that people assume I just take after him. So we never get the confused looks from strangers that Lisa, my friend who’s also adopted, gets. Her family is white as cream, and she’s got skin the color of the cello she plays. So they get lots of questions. One time she snapped at a lady in a grocery store, “No, I’m not my parents’ starving African charity case—I was born in Riverside, but thanks for filling my ignorance quota for the day.”

I was very impressed with her for producing such an articulate zinger on the fly.

I only have one memory from before becoming a Winters. It’s just a shard: I’m being put in a car—a red car. I think maybe someone was smoking—something about the scent of cigarettes always brings this memory right to the surface of my mind. Was this my birth mother? A foster family? I don’t know, and I’m glad for that. I don’t want to remember being left.

Hannah is all I’ve got now.

As though I’ve summoned her, my sister shuffles in, those dark circles under her eyes the color of the fried eggplant she loves so much, Mom’s melitzanes tiganites. Her hair is a tangle of waves, and she looks so much like Mom it hurts. She’s wearing one of the UCLA shirts Dad bought both of us, the same one, but hers is a size bigger because she’s five-eleven. I get a crick in my neck just looking her in the eye. She got Dad’s height. Mom thinks I’m so short because I wasn’t held enough as a baby, which has been proven to affect growth.

“What are we making?”

“Chili.”

She nods, then crosses to the pantry to get out the stewed tomatoes and beans: kidney, pinto, cannellini. She grabs a can of sweet corn, then another. Dad likes it with extra corn.

Hannah opens cans while I keep chopping. It feels good to be in here, to be doing something so familiar. We can control at least this one thing.

I throw the onions into the pot with some olive oil and let them sting my eyes as I stir them. What are the odds, I wonder, of being orphaned twice?

The last time a parent left me, child protective services came and took me away. Could they do it again?