“Vomiting?” said Eleanor Mallon. “Vomiting seems a fairly general way of getting sick to me!” She laughed in order to demonstrate that we were just two nice women, well disposed to one another, having a friendly and inconsequential conversation.

“I mean the way she was vomiting,” I said tersely. I may have even snapped this. “I’d seen it before. Everything comes up in one big heave and then you’re retching for the rest of the night — your stomach’s basically in contractions, even though you’ve already brought everything up.”

Eleanor glanced at Kelli. “Oh, poor Kelli. That must’ve been awful for you.”

“Kelli puked the carpet,” said Kelli. “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

Eleanor Mallon broke into a grin, charmed, as people always were, at my sister’s cartoonish chuckle. She glanced at me. “She doesn’t seem that traumatized, does she?”

“No,” I said. “She’s actually pretty pleased with herself.”

We were smiling at each other now. Good old icebreaker Kelli.

Eleanor Mallon went over it with me a couple of times. How Jessica and I had scoured the ingredients list on the hot dogs, the store-bought coleslaw. How we had gone back and forth on the idea of taking her to the Emergency Room and, yes, Jessica had been pro and I had been con. But I had also, ultimately, been right. Once she’d had a Gravol, my sister’s retching spasms eased off and she was back to her old self by the following day. Eleanor paused to scribble a sentence in the notebook she’d brought along — she carried a black, dog-eared Moleskine like some kind of undergrad Hemingway wannabe. It subtly altered her housewifely vibe into something a little more bohemian — perhaps beneath Eleanor Mallon’s cardigan and rayon blouse there beat the heart of a poet.

“Well,” she said, once she had finished writing. “Let’s talk about the diarrhea.”