Not home until Thanksgiving? I think of my mom. The longest she’s been away was the four days she came to California last spring when Bob proposed. I can’t imagine not seeing her for months.

“We’ll be in my room. Can you get us a snack?” Mercedes asks. Actually, she doesn’t really ask, she demands.

Cristina returns with a tray piled with packages of fruit snacks and bags of chips. A few bottles of assorted beverages are tucked under her arm. Imagine living here, with this life.

“Tell Tristan not to bug us.” Mercedes takes the snacks from the nanny without a thank-you.

She doesn’t wait for me, either. I scurry to follow her up the stairs, taking them as fast as I can. My supplies rattle in my backpack. I catch up with Mercedes in an upstairs hallway lined with brightly colored paintings in gold frames. There are narrow tables with lumpy sculptures made of rough stone. Little nooks in the wall hold ancient-looking pottery bowls. Mercedes waves a hand at the art. “More of my mom’s show-off junk,” she says. “Come this way.”

We turn and I follow her into a room that’s the size of at least four of my bedrooms. Like the living room, it also has big windows that are black mirrors in the dark. Each of the three walls are painted a different color: pink, orange, green. Mercedes plops down on one of two beanbags that face the windows.

I drop my backpack on the floor by the other beanbag, but I don’t sit down. Her room is like a museum. A half-sister museum. My mom and I always had a once-a-month museum visit. We would pick a different one each time. Art museums, science museums, fishing museums. I wonder if we’ll still have museum day and if we’ll have to bring Kenny and Lucas. Mercedes’s museum has posters of movies and bands I’ve heard of but know nothing about. Competing with the posters are more gold-framed paintings of landscapes and night skies and abstract rectangles—obviously more of her mom’s “junk.”

“Do you ever go visit your mom when she’s traveling? Have you been to Tokyo?”

“No,” she says with a shrug. She inspects her fingernails and picks at the sparkly silver polish. A crumb of silver lands on the white carpet. “It’s cool, though. Cristina lets me do whatever I want, so I barely even notice my mom is gone.”

Imagine this life, I think again. But this time, I almost feel sorry for her.