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talk about? Once, your father and I, true, we had love. But that was a long time ago.” Allison gnashed on her teeth. “Your father is very cruel. You don’t even know.”
    Their lobster was brought. Lily tried to remember her first sixteen years of life with her mother and father. “Papi’s not cruel.” Papi was too passive to be cruel, she wanted to say.
    “This is what I mean about naive! How can I even talk to you about this if you won’t listen to me.”
    “I’m listening,” said Lily, but wished she weren’t. She kept picking at her lobster with a fork. Her mother stopped eating completely.
    “Your father is very controlling, very unkind. And he doesn’t understand my depression, he doesn’t understand how unhappy I am, and worse, he doesn’t care. He is like you—he says, what do you have to be depressed about.”
    “Mom,” Lily said quietly. “Answer me. Answer him. What do you have to be depressed about?”
    Tears appeared in Allison’s eyes. “My whole life is a complete failure.”
    “Why do you say this?” Lily wished she could be more outraged. She wanted to be outraged. If this were the first time she was hearing it, she might be. Soon her mother would wave off mention of the four children she had ably raised, of the six grandchildren she had, of the various happy lives of her offspring, of her son, the congressman! She would bring forth mention of a job she didn’t get when she became pregnant with Lily, as if that job would have been the panacea for the ills of the currently afflicted. She would bring forth Lily’s father, and how Allison’s whole life had revolved around him. “He was the tree under whose shadow we all fell.”
    Did Allison just say that, or was the voice inside Lily’s head so frigging loud?
    She looked up at her mother, who nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s true, you, too, Lily, you, too, were under his shadow. Under his and Andrew’s. I don’t know why you girls love Andrew so much, he was never there for you. Especially for you. He would take you out once a month to the movies, and you thought he was a gift from God, why? I would spend all day, every day with you, parks, bike rides, ice skating, movies, book stores, and I never got you to look at me with a hundredth of the affection you looked at him. And you ask me why I’m bitter.”
    “I didn’t ask,” Lily said.
    “My son—is he all right, by the way? Now that his father is not here, he stopped calling.”
    “He doesn’t call anybody.”
    “What’s your excuse? Or your sisters’? None of you ever call me. Amanda has more kids than anybody and she calls me the most, and that’s hardly ever. Just you wait, wait till you’re my age. I hope God will give you daughters as ungrateful as yourself.”
    To say Lily wished she were anywhere but here would have been like saying she preferred to sleep in a comfortable bed rather than on a bed of rusty nails.
    “Mom,” she said, “you could be in New York, seeing us every week. But you moved to Hawaii. What do you want?”
    “To die,” said Allison. “Sometimes that’s all I want, relief from the blackness.” She took Lily’s hand. “Daughter, I think of killing myself sometimes, but I’m too afraid of God. I think of killing myself every day.”
    Lily took her hand away. Did this, or did this not, count as psychological abuse? “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
    “Daughters are supposed to be friends to their mothers in their old age.”
    “I think they’re supposed to be daughters first. I can’t believe you’re telling me you want to die. Do you understand how wrong that is?” If only it had been the first time she were hearing it. But she had a vivid memory of being thirteen years old when her mother took her into the bedroom and told her calmly that she only had three months to live. Still, every time Lily heard it, it sounded like the first time. It felt like the first time.
    “I’m not telling you to upset you. I’m