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no fight,” Gus choked out. “One day last week, while I was at work, she just moved all her stuff out. When I got home, she was gone.” She sobbed again.
    “I never thought she was good enough for you, anyway,” muttered Carol, now standing rigidly to Gus’s left. “What was the name of that college she went to?”
    “Mom—shush!” said Perri.
    Gus, too, took the opportunity to glare at their mother before she wiped her nose on her sleeve, causing Perri to visibly recoil. “The worst part is, I hate myself for feeling this way,” Gus moaned on. “Compared to ninety-nine percent of the world’s population, I’m so incredibly privileged—”
    “You’re not that privileged!” Perri said with a quick laugh.
    “I am privileged!” cried Gus, who had famously (in the Hellinger family) begun to collect spare change for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua at the age of twelve. “There are a lot of people in the world with actual problems, like not having enough food to eat or money to pay the rent—not fake problems like their girlfriends leaving them.” Gus let out another sob. “It’s just that… I feel like such a loser.”
    “Please! You are so far from being a loser,” said Perri. “For starters, you have a completely heroic job helping people in need—when you’re not busy educating the next generation of lawyers.”
    “I’m also thirty-six and alone!” wept Gus, who split her time between the civil division of the Legal Aid Society of New York, where she worked as a family law attorney out of theBronx office, and Fordham Law School, where she was a recently tenured professor specializing in gender and contracts.
    “I’m really sorry about Debbie, but you can be single and still have a life,” Olympia felt suddenly compelled to interject, her own choices seemingly on trial yet again.
    “Well, maybe you can,” said Gus, with a quick laugh.
    Olympia flinched. Was Gus trying to imply that she had no heart? That she thrived on cheap hookups? You don’t think I want someone in my life, too? Olympia was about to say, wanted to say, but pride stopped her. “Why am I any different from you?” she asked instead.
    Gus wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Let’s just say I’d never have a baby on my own.”
    “Try three babies!” Perri cut in, not to be outdone. “And a husband who’s never home.”
    “I heard that,” Mike called from the background.
    “I’m nine years old, Mom,” came another male voice from yonder. “And you’re never home, either.”
    “That’s not true, Aiden!” said Perri, looking like she, too, might start crying.
    “I didn’t set out to have a baby on my own,” Olympia heard herself telling Gus, and growing defensive too, and feeling unable to stop herself on either count. “I just happened not to have had that kind of relationship with Lola’s father. I’m sorry that’s so hard for everyone to understand.”
    Fearing that Gus would deem her an elitist for having used a donor with a clearly privileged background, and that Perri would disapprove of her having used a sperm bank at all, Olympia had kept the entire matter of Lola’s paternity a secret from everyone but her college roommate, who lived in Japan.
    It was more than that too: What if her sisters saw her as a failure?
    “Well, how are we supposed to understand when you’ve still never told us who Lola’s father is?” asked Gus, prosecutorial even when in a crisis.
    “ Must we go there now?” said Olympia.
    “I’m sorry for being curious!” cried Gus. “I’m your sister. So shoot me.”
    “No one you know. How’s that?”
    “But someone you did?”
    “It’s true, Pia. We’re all dying to know who the redhead is,” Carol trilled in the background.
    “Thank you, Mom,” said Olympia, wondering why she bothered to attend these family get-togethers, since they always left her in a foul mood. “Now, if everyone is done harassing me, I’m going to use the bathroom.” Olympia