“Now that was some movie,” Mary Alice said when the lights came on in the nearly empty theater, and she had come up the aisle to meet me. “I swear, though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much talking—then all that coming and going. Somebody ought to complain to the manager.”

“Let’s go get some frozen yogurt,” I suggested quickly. The theater manager’s office was probably already filled with disgruntled patrons complaining about rodents.

“Okay. Chocolate and vanilla swirl, though. Last time you talked me into getting apricot that tasted like figs. Yuck. I can’t even imagine how they got apricot yogurt to taste like figs.”

“They were tropical apricots,” I said. “Maybe they are supposed to taste like figs.” I followed Mary Alice through the lobby and down the street, drafting like a race car. My sister is six feet tall and admits to weighing 250. I’m almost five-one and weigh 105. At some point in the sixty years we have been sisters, I latched on to the theory of aerodynamics, which simplifies my keeping up with her.

“Shouldn’t make any difference. They’re always doing apricots that way, though. Like they can’t quite get them right. Remember that lipstick I bought a couple of weeks ago called Apricot Splendour? Turned out pink as a boiled shrimp in spite of the fancy way they put the u in splendor. You want it? It’s too light for me.”

“Sure. Pass it along.”

Mary Alice opened the door of Yogurt, Please, and cool air rushed out to greet us. It was the first week of June, but in Alabama, that’s summer. The thermometer in front of the bank across the street read eighty-nine.

“Get us a table,” she said. “I’ll get the yogurt.”

“This is my treat. You got the movie.”

“Don’t be silly. Will Alec will pay for this one.”

We grinned at each other. Will Alec Sullivan was her first husband, the one with, I believe, all the Coca Cola stock. Sister has been married three times and widowed three times. All three husbands were rich, twenty-eight years older than she was, and adored her.

“Let him pay,” I agreed.

I found a table at the back of the shop and sat down with the sense of unreality one has coming from a movie in the afternoon. I glanced at my watch. Three o’clock. My husband, Fred, wouldn’t be home until six. I’d have plenty of time to stop by the Piggly Wiggly and pick up something. Maybe a barbecued chicken and a salad.

I was making a mental grocery list when Sister handed me my yogurt and pulled out the chair across from me.

“Week after next is my sixty-fourth birthday,” she said. “I thought I ought to tell you.”

I dipped my spoon into the yogurt. “Okay.”

“Everybody thinks I’m going to be sixty-six.”