While I was in the kitchen, pouring milk into my mother’s china jug, I could hear Eleanor Mallon take a stab at making chit-chat with my sister.

“So how’ve you been, Kelli?”

“Kelli-bean,” said Kelli, maybe thinking of Trevor.

“How’ve you been feeling? I heard you were sick?”

“Kelli puked,” said Kelli.

“Oh dear,” said Eleanor Mallon.

“Right there in that chair,” I said, placing a tray of tea and cookies on the coffee table in front of the social worker’s crossed legs. She was wearing nutmeg pantyhose and her toes looked sad and trapped behind the hosiery. “Just let ’er rip right onto the carpet, didn’t you, Kell?”

Kelli actually smiled at the memory. She didn’t recall the misery of the experience, only that she’d been naughty. “Kelli puked the carpet,” she confirmed. “Kelli’s tummy. Tummy hurt.”

Eleanor Mallon turned to me. “What was it? A bug?”

“Ok, so here’s the thing,” I said. And as I said it, I knew I was about to start talking too much too fast. “I’m pretty sure it was something she ate. Kelli has a shellfish allergy. Or, not so much an allergy, because people tell me it’s only an allergy if you get hives and swell up, which she doesn’t, she just pukes. It’s a reaction. I have it too — we go anywhere near clams or mussels, bivalves basically. Everything just comes up. Lobster and shrimp are fine for some reason. But it’s —”

“So Kelli had shellfish?”

“No,” I said. “We couldn’t figure it out —”

“We?”

I tried not to give Eleanor Mallon a look of contempt. Don’t play dumb with me, ’Nor Malla, I wanted to say. I took a breath.

“My friend Jessica Hendy,” I said. “The one who called you, I assume. She was there the night Kelli got sick.”

Eleanor Mallon gazed at me a moment through her owly glasses. Too-wit, too-woo, I wanted to say. Where was that from? A children’s show, I thought — there’d been a character named Wise Old Owl who knew all the answers. Just like Eleanor Mallon did. She knew, for example, who had called Adult Protection. She knew what was going to happen to me and Kelli next. She knew the kind of answers I should be giving to her questions and the kind I shouldn’t. Which I did not. I could only guess. I, therefore, was at a disadvantage. The longer she stared, the more I wanted to say it. Too-wit, too-woo. Too-wit, too-woo, Owlface.

“And so,” resumed Eleanor Mallon, “you and your friend Jessica tried to determine what Kelli might’ve eaten that made her sick?”

“Yes!” I said. “It was weird, because we’d all eaten the same thing. And I have the same seafood reaction that Kelli does, so if it made her sick it should’ve made me sick too.”

“So perhaps it wasn’t something she’d eaten.”

I deflated. Now came the indefensible part of my story. “I just really felt like it was,” I told her. “I’d seen Kelli get sick like that a lot of times in the past. And I mean, I’ve been sick like that. It’s a — it’s a really distinctive way of getting sick.”