I didn’t have an exact count for the number of times I’d stood up to my sister Carol in my lifetime, but it had to be in the single digits.

“If Dad and Johnny want to make fools of themselves, that’s their problem.” I took a deep breath. “But it’s John’s and my house now, so Polly’s staying. And if you don’t like it, you know where the door is—don’t let it hit your butt on the way out.”

Carol reached over and punched me in the shoulder, like a one-person fist bump, only painful.

“Ouch,” I said.

“It’s about time you grew a pair,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

“Okay, then, if Polly’s staying, we’ve got to get both Dad and Johnny romantically entangled elsewhere so they’ll stop fawning all over her.”

I nodded.

“Dad’s easy,” Carol said. “We take down that awful ad in the local paper, ramp up his internet presence, maybe even help him throw a holiday housewarming party in his new man cave.”

I nodded some more. It was enough to know I’d grown a pair—I could let Carol take it from here.

“Jump in anytime,” Carol said.

So much for that theory. “Um, sounds good. I don’t know what we should do about Johnny. He hasn’t told me anything about what happened between him and Kim.”

Carol shook her head. “Michael and Billy were completely useless. They didn’t even try to get the scoop out of him. I thought Johnny would be calling me so much he’d be melting my phone by now, like Michael did when he and Phoebe were falling apart, but I haven’t heard a word from him.”

“So, what do we do?”

Carol leaned forward like a coach on the bleachers at some game. She rested her forearms on her thighs.

“Okay,” she said. “We drag Johnny out to the trailer. And we don’t let up on him until he tells us everything. Once we find out what’s going on, we take it from there. We’ll bring Dad with us so we can keep an eye on him, too.”

“Go team,” I said. I reached over to give Carol a real fist bump.

Her knuckles touched mine, and then she walked her index and middle fingers away from me.

“What was that?” I said.

She grinned. “It’s called the Michael Jackson. Ian and Trevor showed it to me yesterday after school. Even Siobhan thought it was cool, and Maeve picked it up like a pro.”

I slipped into teacher mode. “Maeve has terrific fine-motor control for a three-year-old.”

“Thanks,” Carol said. “She also has terrific aptitude for swearing like a sailor, so it’s kind of a wash.”

I fist-bumped Carol again, and then we both moonwalked our fingers away from each other.