“My children are all named after saints,” my mother said. She was talking to Frankie and me as if we weren’t her children but were two strangers having breakfast at her table. I was eating toast. Frankie was doodling behind a fortress of two cereal boxes. My mother hadn’t looked up and it occurred to me she might actually be talking to the Florida Catholic opened in front of her. “Matthew. Mary-Katherine. Joseph. Francis of Assisi. What could be more Catholic than that? Not good enough for the wafer club, though.” She sipped her coffee and turned a leaf of the newspaper. “I should have named one of my children Jesus. There’s a Mexican woman at work who’s divorced and has a son named Jesus. She even says ‘Jesus’ when you sneeze. I’ll bet they let her take Communion.”

Karen was leaning against the kitchen counter eating an Oreo. She said, “Who’s Mary-Katherine?”

Mary-Katherine was Karen. She’d refused to be confirmed when she was twelve and had chosen, instead, her own unofficial, “unconfirmation” name: Karen Carpenter Ragazzino. My mother said, “Someone I used to know. I take it, since you’re up and dressed, that you’re going to school today?”

“Yeah,” Karen said to her Oreo, “I thought I’d go. Seth’s back today, and anyway, I have to clean out my locker.”

“Why?”

“I just told you why. Seth’s back.”

“Why do you have to clean out your locker?”

“Oh. Because I’m quitting.”

My mother looked up from the paper, then looked back down and began to fold it. “I don’t want to hear whatever it is you’re trying to hurt me with right now.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Mother. I’m dropping out of school. But I’m not trying to hurt anyone.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” my mother said. She kept folding the newspaper until it was the size of a biscuit, then, squeezing it tightly, she looked at Karen and said, “What do you think is going to happen to you if you don’t get an education? What do you plan on doing?”

“Well, I don’t plan on shooting any rock stars or presidents, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not even funny.”

“Maybe I’ll head up to Utica,” Karen said.

“Maybe you should! If I’m doing that bad of a job, maybe you should all just run to your fathers! That will solve everything! It’s clearly worked out just peachy for Matt!”

Matt, we all knew, had called from Utica the previous week asking my mother for money, which she’d mailed to him only after adamantly refusing to do so.