Janine closed the front door softly, then walked back into the kitchen, her breath held tightly in her lungs. Chrissy was sitting at the table doing homework while Beth tended the dinner her mother had walked away from—pork chops and mashed potatoes, a pot of green beans, a salad. Rick sat at his usual spot in the family room, his boots on the coffee table, watching the evening news.

“They want me,” Janine said, exhaling. She clasped the phone lightly against her chest, like a kitten or a baby. “The writing school. It was unanimous.”

Chrissy looked up from her algebra textbook and smiled. “That’s great, Mom.”

“Congratulations,” Beth said, mashing potatoes with a fork. Janine took only the mildest notice that she’d used soy instead of regular milk. “That’s awesome.”

Rick got up from his chair and came over to kiss her forehead. “I knew they would,” he said. Janine told herself that he was merely expressing confidence in her abilities, but she could not help feeling a little let down by his reaction.

At dinner, conversation moved on to other topics: an upcoming church mission trip Chrissy wanted to take, a problem Beth was having with one of her professors and her plans for her upcoming twenty-first birthday, which she hoped to spend in Daytona Beach. On her eighteenth birthday she’d come home with a small Chinese character tattooed in black on her shoulder blade. The character meant “freedom,” she’d explained, but it was easy to cover up for job interviews. (What about her wedding? Janine had despaired.)

As Beth entered her third year of community college, Janine and Rick had wondered to each other when she would want to move out, but they liked having her home, where they could keep up with her increasingly confusing career aspirations and stay vigilant against cohabitation or any further tattooing. Janine thought it was strange the way rebellion and the desire to please could coexist in Beth, but from her friends and her sister she understood that this was the way of this generation. They wanted to sin, then confess their sins to their parents, who acted more like friends than parents. Janine never would have told her own mother some of the things she’d had to hear.

“And next semester I have to take Communications III,” Beth was saying.