“Okay, Nicky, let Aunt India sit.” My sister’s calm voice preceded her into the room.

Nicholas continued to talk and cling to my neck.

“It’s fine, Carmen,” I said.

I sat down on the couch, Nicholas on my lap. Carmen frowned at me. She hated it when anyone undermined her authority in any venue, especially in Nicholas’s case.

There was no mistaking Carmen as my sister. We both had fair skin and changeable gray eyes, gifts from our father. Although my dark hair was long and wild, Carmen had hers in a no-nonsense mom cut. My mother had been known to mix up our baby pictures.

As I sat, I noted that my sister was, as my father adeptly described, as big as a triple-wide trailer. Carmen was pregnant with twins, in accordance with her life plan. Nothing screwed up Carmen’s life plan: At thirty-one, she’d have three kids, a house, a guinea pig, and a loving husband. After graduating high school, she had attended one of the half-dozen Presbyterian colleges that cluster in western Pennsylvania, a choice that had thrilled my mother, a Presbyterian minister, to no end. As intended, Carmen had met her future husband, Chip Tuchelli, while there, and they’d married right after graduation. They had moved back to Stripling and established their careers as teachers: Carmen, high school, and Chip, elementary. They’d borne Nicholas, and now my blessed sister was pregnant with twin girls. It was all very disgusting.

Before Carmen could remind me that Nicholas was her son, my mother entered the living room. She wore a long patchwork skirt and a lime green T-shirt. Her gray hair was pulled back into a high ponytail.

“Oh, good, you’re finally here,” my mother said. “How’s Olivia?”

“She’s in surgery, or she was. She might be out by now.”

Carmen sat down beside me on the couch. “Mom told us what happened. Mark really pulled Olivia out of the fountain?”