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incantations. When she said “Manhattan,” I conjured people with sleek black forms, like ghosts, gliding down streets that glittered in the dark. I pictured Sarah becoming one of them. I could feel all those ghosts in the room when she played her guitar, their misty hands clapping when she finished each song. But then she’d gone to U of O, and then she’d met Peter, and then they’d moved to Eugene and gotten married and had kids. Sometimes I felt I was living in New York for both of us. And sometimes I thought I was in New York out of some sort of perverse sibling rivalry.
    “Hi, Dawn!” Sarah said in a staccato when she answered. “I’ve only got like five minutes. Dinnertime.” I heard Peter murmur something in the background and one of their girls begin to howl. The twins, Holly and Hannah, had come a few months before I graduated from college.
    “Takes less than five minutes to tell you I got a job!” I announced.
    “Oh my gosh, I want to hear everything,” she squealed with real delight, and then, away from the phone, “Baby, just put it in for a minute and then pull it out to see if it’s hot. Yeah, just a minute, I promise.”
    “Well, it’s at Charm magazine,” I said in a ritzy voice.
    “Really? An assistant job? An editor job?” She got dimmer as she spoke—the telltale sign of the receiver slipping away. She must have been holding the phone with her shoulder, probably a kid in each arm.
    I talked fast. I considered leaving out the part about meeting Regina at Robert’s Pretzel Party, but in the end I left it in, and she groaned at Robert’s name, as expected.
    “Have you told Mom or Dad yet?” she asked.
    “Not yet,” I said.
    The phone clattered from her ear to the floor. I listened to the faraway sounds of the kitchen, scuffling of feet, beeping of microwave, Sarah and Peter sweet-talking the twins as they buckled them into their high chairs. Only then did Sarah pick up the phone again.
    “Sorry, sweetie,” she said.
    I said it was okay and promised to tell her more after my first day of work.
    “At least call Mom. She’ll be upset if she finds out you didn’t tell her right away.”
    “Of course,” I said, though, in fact, if Sarah hadn’t ordered me to do it, I might have waited a day or two before calling.
    _________
    I read in some women’s magazine (maybe it was Charm ) that it takes fifteen years for a kid to get over a divorce. So maybe in seven years I’d dial my parents right away. For the time being I was grateful Sarah always answered, even if she dropped the phone on me a few minutes later.
    My dad was a high school history teacher. He’d been at the same school, in the town over from ours, for twenty-nine years, since just before Sarah was born, and his job advice always had a local slant. He’d heard they needed a secretary at the Ford dealership down the road from his school, or, if I was ever interested in selling insurance, Sherry Fogel, from church, had a good business and she was looking to bring in some new blood . . .
    My mom, on the other hand, hadn’t worked until the divorce, when I was in high school, at which point she’d become a Mary Kay lady, and her advice had a manic salesy tinge to it. You just have to march into the offices where you want to work with your résumé in hand, then wait till someone will see you!
    My dad and I only spoke sporadically. Every month or so I’d call to update him. He never called. My mom, on the other hand, called a few times a week to share the latest town gossip. You got a lot of it as a Mary Kay lady. Sherry Fogel’s business must really have been doing okay, because rumor had it she’d gotten a face-lift, and if my mother’s powers of detection were as sharp as ever, breast implants too.
    A couple of days before the Pretzel Party, my mom had called to tell me she had a great idea for me: “Have you thought about creating flyers? Just dropping them off at every business you can think of. Flyers have