Amy nodded and silenced the ringer. She watched the little red light on the port until it stopped blinking before asking, “Who’s calling from the bank?”

I turned the television on.

“What movie are we going to watch?” Meg interrupted. “I think . . .” Her printed nails skimmed over the rack of DVDs at her feet, and she tapped one. “How about The Ring?”

I was grateful to Meg for changing the subject. Meg was always good at reading a room and constructing and polishing true-ish stories to distract, charm, or disarm someone.

“I hate The Ring,” Amy whined, and looked at me imploringly.

It wasn’t funny when Meg dressed Jo up as the girl from the movie who climbs up the well. I didn’t laugh at all. Okay, maybe a little, but I was still upset at my oldest girls for tormenting their little sister.

“Really?” Jo’s voice had a spooky tone, like she was trying to scare her sister. Jo reached out to tickle Amy’s sides, and Amy jerked away.

“Please, Mom, tell Meg we aren’t watching The Ring!” Amy pulled at my sweatpants.

“What about The Skeleton Key?” Beth suggested. That was her favorite movie. Beth loved anything with Kate Hudson, and living just outside New Orleans made the movie especially terrifying.

“Jo, what do you want to watch?” I asked.

Jo moved over to the DVD stand, making Amy yelp when Jo’s knee landed on Amy’s toes as she passed.

“Cabin Fever or . . .” She picked up Interview with the Vampire.

It made me feel like a cool mom when my girls liked movies that I loved growing up. Interview with the Vampire was my favorite movie for a good twenty years. To this day, Anne Rice is the only author whose entire works I’ve read.

Meg said in a quiet voice, “That movie reminds me of River . . .”

Even hearing that boy’s name made my insides feel like a Ferris wheel on fire, but fortunately my girls’ penchant for drama distracted me. Amy moved to her feet and grabbed the movie straight from Jo’s hands and tossed it under the Christmas tree. Jo yelled an indignant “Hey!” and Meg blew a kiss to Amy.

“John’s calling!” Meg yelled, and disappeared from the room before her phone even rang.

“Cabin Fever it is,” Jo said, and took the remote from the table.

While Jo fiddled with the DVD player, Amy ran to the bathroom and Beth disappeared into the kitchen. The house was quiet except for the beeping of the microwave, then the soft hum as it spun around whatever Beth was making. My house wasn’t usually quiet like this. When Frank was home, there was always music playing or the sound of him laughing, singing . . . something.

The silence wasn’t going to last long, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted it to, but I was going to enjoy it while it lasted. I closed my eyes, and shortly I started to hear kernels popping and smell a decadent butter odor.

Jo was sitting cross-legged next to the TV, staring down at her candy-cane-striped socks. To a stranger Jo may have looked sad, with her pouty lips and her downcast eyes, but I knew she was calm. She looked like she was thinking about something important, and I wished I could read her thoughts, to help take a little of the weight off her shoulders. I no longer wanted silence.

“How’s the piece coming along?” I asked her. I didn’t get much time alone with Jo now that she had a job—a job that she seemed to love, since she spent so much time there.

Jo shrugged. “It’s good. I think.” She ran her hands up and down her cheeks and looked at me. “I think it’s good. I think it’s really good.” A shy but blinding smile split her face, and she covered her mouth. “I’m almost done. Should I use my actual name?”

“If you want to. You could also use my maiden name. When can I read it?” Her smile dissipated even faster than it had arrived. “Or not.” I added a smile to show I wasn’t upset. I understood why she wouldn’t want me to read her work yet. Of course it hurt my feelings a little bit, but I knew she had her reasons, and I never wanted to add any pressure on her.

“You could send it to your dad,” I suggested.

She thought about it for a second. “You think he has time? I don’t want to distract him.”

Sometimes she sounded too adult for me.

The bathroom door opened in the hallway, and Amy came walking back into the living room, her bedroom blanket in tow. My parents had given it to me at her baby shower, but it was really worn now, the colored patches that made up the little quilt a bit duller.

Amy, with her lip-gloss obsession and blond hair, was trying to grow up too fast. She wanted to be like her older sisters more than anything, but that was the typical youngest-sibling thing. My sister was the same, always following me around and trying to be my equal. Amy was now in seventh grade, which debatably was the hardest grade to push through. I couldn’t remember much of my own seventh grade, so it coul

dn’t have been so bad for me. Ninth grade—now, that I remember.

Jo always teased Amy, warning her sister that she should start preparing for high school now. But Amy was at that pivotal age in her life when she thought she knew everything. She was at the awkward stage in her appearance, too, where she hadn’t quite grown into her features. The bratty little girls in her class liked to make fun of her bony frame and her lack of a period. Just last week, Amy came in asking when she was allowed to shave her legs. My rule had always been that my daughters could shave when they started their period, but when I told Amy that, she had a twelve-year-old’s meltdown in the bathroom. Honestly, I didn’t even know where I got that rule, probably my own mother, and given what Amy was going through, I helped my girl shave her legs that day.

Meg was not only the oldest, but she was also the second-in-charge of our government-owned home. Sometimes it was easy to pretend that it was our home, until something happened like getting a ticket for my grass being too long. I had looked out the window to find a man standing in my front yard, bent down and measuring my grass. When I went outside, he cowered back to his truck, but not before handing me a ticket. Apparently the housing office didn’t have anything better to do than measure people’s grass.

I hoped that one day we would be able to buy a home of our own, maybe after Frank retired from the Army. I didn’t know what state we would settle in when he was finally done, but something like the middle of nowhere in New England sounded nice. But Frank often talked about moving to a sleepy beach town where you could wear flip-flops every day. Of course, it would depend on where our daughters ended up, too. Amy wouldn’t be out of the house for another six years, and Beth . . . well, I wasn’t sure if Beth would ever want to leave, and that was okay, too.

Beth brought in two bowls of popcorn, and everyone got comfortable in the small room. I stayed in Frank’s chair, Amy sat next to Beth as Meg walked in and plopped down on the opposide side of the couch, and Jo stayed on the floor near the TV.