“My sister?”

“Mmm.”

“My sister ...”

“You think we don’t notice?”

“Don’t notice what?”

“The women you don’t write about when you write about the ones--when you write about the ones you do write about.”

“Is that what you think? It’s all a distraction?”

“What was her name?”

“Her name?”

“Yeah, and what was she like?”

“I don’t remember what she was like.”

“That can’t be true. You remember everything.”

“Well, that’s the thing in’it?”

“Mmm?”

“Knowing you can forget something… someone like that, your sister ... makes everything more important.”

“You don’t remember anything about her?”

“A little. I remember the day she died. I was ten. We never had many tender moments. I remember her mostly with my mother. With my other sister.”

I took a sip. She took took a drag. We didn’t look at each other while she exhaled.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, nothing. Not your fault. Just, ah… thinking.”

Another drag.

“What comes to mind?”

“‘What comes to mind?’”

I watch the smoke leave her lips this time. I think of the seventies. I think of disco dancing with my mom in the living room of our Regent Park apartment. In fleeting abstract terms, I think of my two sisters and how they were different from each other. How they were different from me. I think of the dogs we had, Winston and Bozlee, Sooner and Taylor and George. I think of my mom’s boyfriends and watching Saturday Night at the Movies with Elwy Yost. I strain to focus, try to remember a single one-on-one conversation I had with Misty. Not a fight. Not an argument. A conversation. But the truth is I can’t even recall what she looked like. At least, no images come that aren’t photographs that sat in curio cabinets or on hutches for years after she died. Cheats. Memory cheats. I remember that shriveled left hand and the permanent crook of her arm. I remember one white dress, a fragment of a smiling mouth.

“Sweetie?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I, baby. So am I.”