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crowded in here. I think Cree and I have this under control. Why don't you go get started on your homework and let us catch up. I'll call you when it's time to set the table." She turned back to the cupboard to stack cans of cat food.
    The twins left, carrying the cats. Cree folded the shopping bags as Deirdre put on an apron and began washing vegetables. The music began again upstairs, this time the insistent, battering beat of Zoe's rap. Cree leaned against the counter, watching her sister's face in the mirror over the sink as they conversed. Deirdre was thirty-six, two years younger and, even in the thick-soled jogging shoes she always put on after work, three inches shorter than Cree. Now she was dressed in her teaching clothes, a white blouse and a practical floral skirt with a faint handprint of chalk dust on one thigh, a silk scarf at her throat, looking very much the middle school teacher at the end of a long day. Cree knew from experience that people seeing them side by side would recognize them as sisters but wouldn't be able to say which was older. Deirdre had prettier, more delicate features, made dramatic by darker hair and brows, but her face showed deeper lines of both worry and laughter, the paradoxical marks of teaching and motherhood. When they'd been in their teens, Cree had often felt largish and plain by comparison. Later, she'd discovered that men could fall just as hard for a fuller-bodied woman, and that had evened things out.
    "Monday, huh," Cree inquired.
    "It certainly is that." Deirdre put the greens in the salad spinner, set it aside, and began scrubbing some carrots. "What's this about a dog?"
    "It's complex. I was just asking the girls for advice. Joyce said you called — anything urgent? I left a message."
    Deirdre glanced at the blinking red light on the answering machine she hadn't had time to check. "Not urgent. Just that Mom called this morning. She likes to call up for heart-to-heart chats when I'm running around trying to get ready for school."
    "Uh-oh. What was on her mind?" When their mother called Deirdre, it often had to do with Cree, and vice versa.
    "She told me the doctor said she has congested coronary arteries."
    "Well, we suspected as much."
    "Yeah. So she's supposed to go in for an angioplasty - where they blow up this little balloon in your artery? She says her friend Marie Haskell had one last year, and it was no big thing."
    "But you're worried?"
    Deirdre turned her back to the sink, leaning against it with her arms crossed. "Well, yeah. You know."
    "Was she?"
    "She plays it down. But I'd say, yes. Can't blame her." Deirdre frowned, then brightened. "And then she talked about you."
    "I figured."
    "She told me her new heart doctor is a total dreamboat and is your age and recently divorced." A tight grin. She turned back to the sink but kept her eyes on Cree's in the mirror. "She thought maybe next time she went to see him, you could come with her - ostensibly to help her, you know, decide on treatment or whatever, did I think that was a good idea? I figured you deserved fair warning."
    Cree laughed and gripped her head in exasperation. "So what was your verdict? Good idea?"
    "Uh-uh. No comment. I'm staying completely out of it." Deirdre applied herself to the carrots.
    It was all lighthearted, supposedly. Mother's concern for her widowed daughter's singleness, childlessness, strange profession, and bouts of existential anguish. Mike had died nine years ago, and Cree still wore her wedding ring. No, she hadn't gotten over it, didn't have a clue how to let go of the sweetness they'd had, and given what had happened when he'd died there was no way to explain to Mom the confusions that came with meeting other men. She was married forever to a dead man and devoted to a metaphysical quest, like some kind of nun in a strange religion with herself as its only adherent. You could laugh all you wanted at people's concern and matchmaking reflexes and the rest, but you still couldn't