Jackie followed her inside. The house was immaculate, as though no one lived there. Some people prefer to make their homes so neat that there is no evidence of life anywhere at all.

“You had something to say, I think,” Jackie said. “I came by to hear it.”

“You were always quick to the point. Even as a child.”

Her mother led Jackie into the kitchen, which was as pristine as the living room. The colors were teal and raspberry, the same as every other room in the house, with accents of mint. It resembled a model home, and Jackie wondered if the perfect oranges perfectly arranged in the glass bowl on the counter were just wax.

Jackie looked again at the oranges, the kitchen, the clean walls and furniture. She was not sure she had ever been inside this house. Of course, she must have grown up here. Unless her mother moved after she had grown old enough to move away, but she would have heard about it, probably been involved in the moving process, possibly even the process of picking a new place. Also, at nineteen, she couldn’t have moved away from home very long ago. But nothing about the house was familiar to her. She looked around the kitchen trying to guess which drawer held the silverware, the surest sign of kitchen familiarity, and she hadn’t a clue.

“Do you remember years ago, when we had your best friends Anna and Gracia over for a birthday party and you were annoyed because your birthday wasn’t until the next day?” asked her mother.

“Ah,” Jackie said. “Mmm,” she said. She slipped open a drawer, trying to appear like a person who casually knows where the silverware is. The drawer was full of dish towels.

“I tried to explain that the next day was a school day, and the elementary administration sends armed posses of schoolchildren after truants, but you just wouldn’t listen. Always stubborn, you.” Her mother’s eyes were wide and her lower lip was folded under her teeth. Her fingers were pressed pale into the Formica counter.

Jackie tried another drawer. It was full of an opaque, fatty liquid, simmering from some invisible heat source.

“No,” Jackie told herself. She hadn’t been looking for the hot milk drawer. The silverware drawer. If she knew where that was, then she knew the house. If she didn’t, then.

“I’ve never been inside this house,” she said. Her mother didn’t look surprised.

“When you were ten you hit your head on this counter here. I thought you’d be hurt but instead you were laughing. You said it reminded you of a character in a movie doing a funny fall, and that picturing it that way, from a distance, made it hurt less. You couldn’t stop laughing.”