“I’ve been to youth group too,” Marianne said. “It was boring.” The braid was starting to veer away from the center, and Marianne had to loosen two sections and start again. In high school chemistry class, she’d sat behind a girl who wore a different, impeccably neat French braid each day—sometimes straight, sometimes diagonal or even zigzagged—and Marianne had studied the back of her head intently for an entire school year. She pulled more hair from the other side and carefully worked to correct things. “But you liked it.”

After a long time, Ruth said, “I guess I thought it would be helpful. I like to think about heaven. You know, to picture Mom there, like a place I could see her again.”

“Oh,” said Marianne. At twenty-seven, and a poet, she didn’t have any words of solace or wisdom, nothing that would not sound false or hollow. “Is it something you’ve talked to Dad about?”

Ruth shook her head. “Do you miss Mom?”

Marianne sighed; the braid looked nothing like the girl’s from chemistry class. “Every day. Then sometimes I think what I’m missing is the idea of her. I miss the things I imagine us doing, things we spent, like, a tiny percent of our life together doing.”

“Like what?”

“Like, if I see a mom and daughter in a museum, I’ll miss her, even though we went to the Virginia Museum or the Smithsonian maybe once a year. Or a mom and daughter in a sushi restaurant. Mom never ate sushi with me. There wasn’t any sushi around when I was growing up.”

“Now there’s a place next to Food Lion. It’s a teriyaki place, but they have sushi too.”

“Yeah.” Marianne took the elastic band holding her own hair in a ponytail and secured the end of Ruth’s braid, doubling the elastic many times. It had turned out okay—lumpy in some places and not exactly straight, but it wasn’t falling apart. “There,” Marianne said. “Punk cheerleader, French-braided by her drunk mom.”

Ruth patted her head. “You might be drunk, Mare, but you’re not my mom.”

“I know,” said Marianne.

“I don’t have a mom.”

“You do,” Marianne said. “You did, I mean. You’ll always have a mom, even if it’s just a mom you remember.”

Ruth slipped her fingers into the braid and undid it, setting Marianne’s elastic band on the edge of the sink. “Thanks. Dad is still going to kill you.”

Except, of course, he didn’t. The next morning at breakfast, Ruth waited for him to say something, her hot pink bangs combed in front of a black velvet headband, but he kept his eyes in a John Grisham paperback while Noreen, unsure of her role, nervously smiled. Marianne, on a walk at the time, came home to find her sister loading the dishwasher, her father on the deck with Noreen.