“How are my adorable niece and nephew?” I asked.

“The kids are great,” Meg said.

A crash, followed by a wail.

“Oopsie,” Meg said. “I have to go. Daisy threw her milk.”

“It’s okay.” I pushed back from my desk, almost bumping into the opposite wall. My Chelsea studio on the fringes of public housing was half the size of my attic room back home. No real stove, no storage, no homemade curtains framing a view of pasture and pine. Since Ashmeeta moved out, I struggled to pay the rent. But I was still living on my own in New York City, epicenter of the food scene and the publishing world. The capital of reinvention, where being a single woman over the age of twenty-seven was not an aberration. “I’ll hold.”

“Are you sure?” Meg asked.

“Me, Mommy, me.” I smiled at the imperious tone on the other end of the line. Definitely Daisy this time. “I talk with Auntie Jo.”

“Give her the phone,” I said.

“You don’t mind?” my sister asked.

I wandered the two steps into my two-burner kitchen. Reached for the bottle of wine I’d brought home from work the night before. Was it too early to start drinking? But no, it was almost . . . Well, not dinnertime, but definitely after lunch. “Are you kidding?” I asked. “Put her on.”

I adored my niece and nephew, the warm, sticky clasp of their starfish hands, their cries of “Auntie Jo! Auntie Jo!” whenever I visited home. Not that I was ready for babies of my own. Meg was the maternal one. But I loved that while my sister cleaned the spilled milk on her kitchen floor, I could pour my wine and listen to her children on the phone. First Daisy (“I haz bangs,” my niece announced with glee) and then DJ’s earnest, heavy breathing, like an obscene phone caller or Dan, the homeless guy in front of the bodega where I bought my morning coffee.

“Sorry,” Meg apologized breathlessly, coming back on the line.

“No problem. So . . .” I took a sip of wine. How a customer could leave a sixty-nine-dollar bottle of cabernet sitting half-full on their table, I’d never understand. “Daisy has a new haircut?”

“They’re working on scissor skills in preschool,” Meg said ruefully.

I snorted with laughter. “Let me guess. Daisy decided paper wasn’t enough of a challenge.”

“When I went to pick her up, all her beautiful baby curls were gone. I almost cried.”

“Look on the bright side,” I suggested. “She could have an amazing future as a surgeon. Or a seamstress.”

“Or a hairstylist.”

“At least hair grows,” I offered.

“That’s what John said.”

“How is my favorite brother-in-law?”

My only brother-in-law, actually, but I liked my sister’s solid husband. I really did. When they got married, I thought Meg was awfully young—only twenty-six—but by Bunyan standards she was practically an old maid.

“Oh, he’s fine. Everything’s fine,” she said. Which is what she always said. Living the dream in Bunyan, North Carolina.