Chapter 3

Mari had the early admission pages spread across the kitchen table when I got home, four of them fanned out in order, a pen lying across the top one at a right angle. She does that. She has done it since she was nine.

"It needs your signature and it needs a copy of my birth record," she said. "Certified. Not a photo of it."

"When."

"Twelve days. And the passport takes six weeks, so really it's now."

I told her I would take care of it Thursday.

Then somebody knocked, and Mari got up before I could, because she turns eighteen in April and she still goes to the door like a kid expecting a package.

Diane was on the step with her coat buttoned.

She had a foil pan in both hands, covered, still warm enough that the cover had beaded underneath, and she was holding it the way you hold a thing you have been told to bring.

"Ray asked me to run this over," she said.

Mari looked at her, then at me, then back.

"Mom?"

"Go finish your pages."

Mari did not move.

"He said you hadn't eaten since Saturday," Diane said.

Twenty-five years, and he sent her. Not his brother. Not his mother, who wrote both our names on that card in her own shaking hand. He picked up the phone in his own kitchen and called the woman from the toast and asked her to drive across town with a pan of food to my door, and he did it because in his head the two of us are the same kind of thing. Interchangeable. Both of us women who do what he asks.

I took the pan. I said thank you. I said it in front of my daughter.

Diane did not let go of it right away.

"Claire," she said. "Whatever they told you down there — "

"Good night, Diane."

I shut the door and stood in my own front hall holding something warm.

Mari said, "Who was that."

"She runs your father's schedule."

"That's not what I asked."

I set the pan on the counter without opening it. I looked at the four pages fanned out in order with the pen laid across them, and I did the arithmetic that mattered, and I want to be clear that I did it wrong.

Ten days until they looked at mine. Twelve until her deadline.

I thought: if I go first, then whatever they decide, they decide it about me and not about her. I thought the careful thing was to put my name in front of hers, the way you put your body in front of somebody in a doorway.

"Thursday," I told her. "I'll get your copy Thursday. After."

"After what?"

"After I take care of mine."

She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. Then she squared the four pages back into a stack and laid the pen on top of them, at a right angle, the way she does.