The sister-in-law and I reached a kind of cool truce, the truce of two women who will be in each other’s lives for decades and have silently agreed not to pretend to a closeness neither feels.

She stopped making the joke, because the joke no longer had a victim who would laugh, and a joke like that dies the instant its target stops supplying the laugh.

We are polite now.

We pass dishes at the barbecues.

It is not friendship and it will never be friendship, and I have stopped experiencing that as a failure of mine to fix, because some relationships are simply transactions that have had the transaction removed, and what is left when you subtract the transaction is, honestly, not much, and that is information, not tragedy.

I used to think the thinness of what remained was a verdict on me, a measure of some failure of warmth on my part.