Paul had greasy hair, wore Izod shirts in pastel hues and was an impassioned member of Greenpeace—an eccentric package that Mary-Sue, much more than Kate, found enchanting. A quiet boy, he lived in a room above his parents’ garage on nearby Mount Curve. Like Mary-Sue, Paul’s folks were displaced cosmopolitans, but unlike her, they were fuddy-duddy foreigners, completely oblivious to youth culture. Paul’s pink Izod shirts were his mother’s idea; his Quebecois father wore cravats to dinner! From time to time, Mary-Sue would leave anonymous parcels outside the boy’s door containing albums by bands like The Doors, The Who and Joy Division, and videotapes of movies like A Clockwork Orange and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, hoping that once he developed a taste for them, it might find its way back to Kate.

Both her daughter and Paul had blossomed from strange little grim-faced children into demure and altogether good-looking teenagers whose beauty was evident to all but themselves. Kate had grown lanky, and at fourteen, was taller than Mary-Sue, with long, lustrous almost-black hair that turned brown in the summer. She had fleshy rose lips, unlike Mary-Sue’s increasingly thin and pale “fish lips,” and high cheekbones that made her elusive smiles radiant. There was something in Kate’s look—the set of the mouth, especially—that made Mary-Sue think of her brother, Bobby, though she didn’t dare let herself entertain the possibility that he might have been her father. Paul conquered his asthma with conscientious lap-swimming and emerged a muscular jock, physically if not psychologically. He had dark, wavy hair that he grew to collar-length—out of indifference, not vanity—like some Romantic poet. Mary-Sue found herself fantasizing about Kate and Paul becoming lovers, sharing the kind of sexy, intense partnership she’d never had with anyone. She didn’t have a clue whether they harbored any erotic feeling for each other—Kate never told her anything anymore—and the pair of them seemed blithely virginal, like the stranded innocents played by Brooke Shields and Chris Atkins in The Blue Lagoon.

One day, Mary-Sue succumbed to temptation and left a copy of a tantric sex manual at Paul’s door. It had a whole chapter on female ejaculation that had stumped even her. Whether these secret dispatches worked or not, she never knew for sure. Her beloved Katie spoke to her less and less as the days went by, locked into teenage solipsism and an acculturated inability to talk to “parental units.” Again, Kate was never bitchy about it, but polite and impenetrable as a lodger, which actually hurt more.

On Kate’s sixteenth birthday, Mary-Sue gave her one hundred dollars to spend on whatever she wanted. She enclosed the cash in a birthday card and left it on Kate’s pillow. Inspired by the Indian takeout she’d had for lunch, she wrote this on the card:

Dear Ranjit,