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By Root 981 0

grounds and set it to boil on the stove. The third sister, the youngest, already sat in the parlor near a window, reading. Luce hadn’t been there since childhood, and yet not even the placement of the candy jar on the mantel had changed. The kind of place where antimacassars draped the backrests of purple velvet chairs, the seat cushions buffed to a pale silver nub by many decades of buttocks dating back nearly to the Grant administration. Bookcases everywhere, filled with leather Miltons and Burnses and Tennysons inscribed on the endpapers with the beautiful looping handwriting of dead people. One of the sisters could recite “Thanatopsis” all the way through without missing a word, and another could do “Snowbound,” and the youngest could declaim “The Masque of the Red Death” with utter conviction, though it was not even a poem at all, and thus she was suspected of paraphrasing. So, imagine the festive evenings of January, a crackling fire and a big bowl of popcorn cooked with a strip of bacon.

Luce had all three of the sisters for classes in the early grades, and because of their family resemblance, they blended together in her memory. Also, because they all three praised her extravagantly and urged her forward in life like no adults had ever done before or since. Each one of them had held her tight by the shoulders at the end of the year and looked into her eyes and said, You can be whatever you want to be.

Strange, now, to find herself grown up and face-to-face with them again, being who she had become.

When the coffee was ready, the sisters rowed themselves opposite Luce on the settee. Each one downing half a cup at one go and then firing up a smoke. Three different brands.

The unaccustomed caffeine came on like a vibration in Luce’s back teeth and frizzed static into her thoughts.

She blurted out some of what she’d come prepared to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about when I was in school, and about the care of children. Lily’s girl and boy live with me now. My mother wasn’t a model for anything but crazy. And it’s not like I’m thinking back and trying to force any of you into being sweet ladies. You had hard expectations. If we were called upon, you made us step up and answer for ourselves. These children aren’t easy.

The eldest sister cracked two notes of smoker’s laughter, indistinguishable from a TB cough. Said, You want us to tell you how to be a mother? If so, you’ve come to the wrong place.

And then they started talking all at once, lapping over one another and completing one another’s sentences as they had done for half a century. Their tone like an argument, except they were all arguing the same point.

The jist was, there’s a big difference between teacher and mother. A teacher has six hours a day for nine months of one year. And thirty children to deal with at a time. You do your best, and you expect the same of them. Then you pass them to the next grade and hope to do better with another bunch.

—How analogous is that to your situation? the younger sister said.

Luce felt like she had fallen back into one of the brutal flash-card battles. She said, Not at all?

—Wrong answer, the eldest said. Or at least incomplete.

Luce revised. She said, Not analogous, except for the part about doing your best and expecting them to do theirs?

—Yes, the youngest said.

The middle sister said, Still a quick learner.

Luce started to say her thanks and leave. But then she said, Well, that’s all fine, but not much help when I get up mornings not knowing where to start. Or when I go to bed afraid I’ve failed them. They fight with each other and set fire to things and kill chickens. Sometimes they’re mean, but mostly they’re scared of the whole world. There’s something wrong with them, and I think Lily’s husband damaged them. They won’t let me give them baths. They don’t like to touch or be touched. I can’t tell if they can be fixed. Or, if they can, how much.

The youngest sister said, You think we’ve never come up against a child some man had been using because they’re the only thing in his world weaker than he is?