By how, and how often, they refer to their childhood, it’s clear this was a happy place for both of them. Their parents were in the movie business in L.A. Their mother was a seamstress at Disney. At home, she made clothes for her girls, often matching outfits, as though they were twins. Frances threatens Cate with home movies of them riding in their own Mad Hatter teacups, spinning around and around in a scaled-down carnival ride their father—a metalworker, a fabricator of special effects—set up for the kids in the acre of desert that was their backyard.

“Whee!” Maureen trills.

Cate can’t tell if they are being ironic about the teacup ride, or not. “Do the teacups still exist?” Cate asks.

Frances says, “Exist?! We still ride them when we go home. Round and round we go.” Cate assembles a mental picture of this, but she can’t make it a good picture.

“Danny refuses,” Maureen says. “He thinks it’s infantilizing.” Danny is the brother with a silly-seeming but fierce addiction to aerosols. He huffs. Maureen has barely mentioned him. Cate suspects there’s a fair amount not to mention.

So here’s a new piece, Cate thinks. She envisions Maureen and Frances, now too big, stuffed into their teacups, their brother high, spinning in his own way, in a lawn chair. She needs more anecdotes, more evidence on Maureen. She’s looking for extenuating circumstances. She’s not sure if the teacups are redeeming or damning.

Frances gets a call on her cell. The picture that pops up is of a guy in a camouflage balaclava. “My old man,” she says. “I’ll take it outside.”

“White Water Jack,” Maureen says, once Frances is outside. “He’s a guide. In a town as small as Maupin, he counts as a celebrity.”

Cate pictures Frances and Jack together in a yellow blow-up raft, shouting happily as they roar down the middle of a river.

“Can you come over tonight?” Maureen asks this shyly.

“Oh boy,” Cate says. “I’d feel a little uncomfortable, I guess.”

“Don’t. You don’t have to. Frances won’t mind.”

“Well, yeah? That’s the bad part, that you have to say that. That there’s a reason she might.”