Once the boys are dressed and their backpacks filled with granola bars and fruit and every Nintendo DS game they own, Katriina herds them out the door. The floor is now spotless, although everything from broken glasses and intact plates to the butter dish and the tablecloth has been stuffed into a garbage bag and left in the middle of the kitchen. Tommy has a cut on the back of his shin from the smashed sugar bowl that he won’t stop complaining about, even though Katriina has cleaned it and applied Polysporin and covered it with a Band-Aid that has robots all over it. He probably should have stitches, but Katriina isn’t going to be that mother who takes her kid to emerg the second they get a hangnail.

At her parents’ house, her mother tries to make her sit down at the kitchen table and have a coffee. “I’m running late, Mom,” she says, dropping the boys’ backpacks on the floor in the hall.

“Katriina, honey, just relax for a moment,” her mother says. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.” Her mother is, as usual, dressed in an oversized wool sweater and thick wool tights even though it is the middle of summer. Inside the house, the air conditioner is cranked to walk-in-freezer temperatures. Katriina feels like she is trapped in the frozen food aisle at the grocery store, but Tommy and Petey don’t seem to notice. They run through the house in search of their ukki, who they know will pick them up and shout at them and wrestle them to the ground – which, as Katriina understands it, is really the main ability that eight- and ten-year-old boys value in a fellow human being. That, and feeding them junk food. Give her children a Happy Meal and they will love you for life.

“I’ll grab something on the way in,” Katriina says. “I’ve got a ton of work to do today.”

Her mother shakes her head. “It’s Sunday, for crying out loud.” Sunday has always been sacrosanct in the Saarinen house, which is why Kahvila has always been closed on Sunday, regardless of the massive amounts of business Shawn has repeatedly told her father they could be doing. “It’s ludicrous to close a pancake house on Sunday,” Shawn had said, and he was right, of course, although Katriina has noticed that over the years he didn’t seem to mind having Sundays off to take the boys fishing, or snowboarding, or mountain biking. Today, she tells her parents that Shawn is playing golf, which is one of the few officially sanctioned Saarinen Sunday events.

“The world doesn’t stop on Sunday just because you do,” Katriina says, more snappishly than she means to, and she instantly regrets her words. “I’m sorry,” she says, digging her fingernails into her palms. Be a better daughter. Be a better daughter.