He scowled at his sister. “Are you in this, too?”

Janet, like him, had gotten most of her features from their father, and they shared a rangy build and bright blue eyes. She used to have his almost-but-not-quite-brown hair until a few years ago, when it mysteriously went blond overnight. From fright at turning forty, she claimed. Now she stretched out her long legs beneath the table and cracked her arms over her head. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the hired help.”

“You’d be singing a different song if you had sons instead of daughters,” their mother said.

“I did all the singing I intend to do back when I was a kid,” Janet said. “I’ll help you fold your mailers and I’ll take ’em to the post office and I’ll even drive you to Albany to picket at the statehouse, but I have yet to see that anything an ordinary person does has any effect whatsoever on the powers that be.”

“And this would explain why you drive your old mother batty by refusing to vote?”

O-kay. At least they were off the topic of him and his marriage. Or him and Clare. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can make for dinner,” he said, beating a retreat into the kitchen.

He was head-deep in the pantry, wrestling out a sack of potatoes, when he saw Janet’s jeans in the doorway.

“What are you going to make?” She moved out of the way as he hoisted the twenty-pound bag onto the table.

“Potato soup,” he said. “Mom’s on one of these all-protein, no-carb diets. All she ever has for supper is this freeze-dried wild salmon or turkey sausages.”

“So of course that makes you crave bread and rice and potatoes.”

“What can I say? I guess I’m the type to want what I can’t have.” He tried to smile, but from the look on Janet’s face, he didn’t succeed.

She dropped her voice, in deference to their mother’s presence in the next room. “How are you doing? Really?”