Cate is distracted by the carrot cake, one piece of which she is already tearing away at. She worries that she eats like someone in a federal prison. Table manners are just one of a list of small social concerns she should probably have sorted out by now, but hasn’t. Interrupting is another. As soon as a conversation is behind her and she’s alone, she goes over it like she’s casting runes. She worries that she was finishing everyone else’s sentences, or lurching wildly off-topic. Also she often, after the fact, takes herself to task for the darkness of her humor, for not gauging if it will be welcome in the circumstances. Maybe this or that ironic remark was taken seriously. Or, worst of all, maybe she has bad breath. She never forgets this about someone; it always haunts her memory; she doesn’t want her breath haunting anyone’s impression of her. So she checks along the way of a day, breathing into her cupped hands to see if anything’s amiss, asking Neale, if she’s nearby, to take a whiff. She pops mints. No one is going to run into ambient garlic while in conversation with her. Or worse, that steel-mill aroma she sometimes picks up off others; she assumes this comes with heavy vitamin regimens.

While Cate is mired in these shallows of self-loathing, Frances freewheels into a long, extremely dull story about the difficulties of restoring an 1840s cross-stitch baby quilt. The problem is getting yarns to exactly match the historical colors. From the sound of things, Frances either gives away a lot of her work or trades it for firewood or honey or massages. Her house has only a woodstove for heat. In a way, hers seems a life full of small adventure; looked at from another angle, Frances seems to be about one step shy of slipping off the grid entirely.

If Cate met her with no backstory, she would only find Frances a sunny, placid woman hanging on to a ’70s lifestyle that was mostly over before she was born. She tries to catch a glimpse of some spark between the sisters, but can’t see anything. She tries to fit their affair inside a box labeled “stuff that happened years ago,” but that doesn’t neutralize it. The sisters are kind to each other; there doesn’t appear to be any rivalry. Which is nice to be around, but now, of course, tainted.