She is astonishing and exhausting and she has my chin, which is Renee’s chin, which turns out to be nobody’s chin — just a chin, on a person, doing no work at all.

On her birthday I stood her against the doorframe between the kitchen and the hall, and Ben held the book flat on top of her head, and I got the yellow tape measure out of the drawer and ran it down to the floor.

Thirty-four and a quarter inches.

I wrote it on the doorframe in pencil with her name and the date, the way ordinary people have done in ordinary houses for about four hundred years, and June was furious about the whole procedure and had to be bribed off the wall with a cracker.

That is the entire distinction, as far as I can tell.

Two women, two tape measures, and the only difference in the world.