If it hadn’t been for Constance’s sudden deterioration of memory, Diana knew she might have been one of those people unable to recognize the time for her to retire. Sixty had been quite old enough to be done with playing doctor/mother to all those women in such intimate, limited, impersonal ways and to accept the limitless intimacy of Constance’s need.

After Diana had put the dishes into the dishwasher, she consulted her own list, left by the kitchen phone. In the last five years she had gradually taken over the cooking from Constance, never able to develop her flair, but methodical enough—‘scientific’ Constance called it for all the consulting of cook books—to offer adequate meals for the two of them. They did not entertain. They never had.

David would not know the precedent he proposed to break in inviting himself to a meal. Even Constance might not remember how rarely anyone else had sat with them at their table. Diana mostly lived alone in their past except when sudden rushes of it overcame Constance, not as memory but as an invasion of the present when Constance briefly became who she had been and suffered again what she had suffered, out of reach of Diana’s comfort.

Diana did not even know what her brother liked to eat, what allergies he might have developed. He had been a frail, nearsighted boy, for a year or so a head shorter than she, before he suddenly grew to eye level, and then she was looking up to him, and they were friends again as they had been as small children.

On his brief, yearly birthday calls, he liked to hark back to that adolescence as a bond between them which couldn’t be broken, before they exchanged his plotted plant and her book and he went back to a life from which she and Constance were entirely excluded. Diana had never laid eyes on his two daughters. She did not even know their married names or how many grandchildren he had.

Her only real connection with David had been impersonal. She used to listen to him read the news on the CBC as she drove home from her office. He had retired only a week after she did. But she had become so familiar with his voice that she could still recognize it on the phone.

A roast chicken. Would he feel obliged to carve it? Would she feel obliged to ask him? How did a sixty-five-year-old brother and sister who hadn’t had a meal together for forty years behave?

David followed his sister into the living room, nodded to Constance, chose Diana’s chair, sat down, covered his face with his hands and wept.