It was a settled, low-grade disregard, a decision made so long ago that no one remembered making it — that Delphina was the success and I was the one you made allowances for — and everyone had simply lived inside that decision for thirty years without once examining it.

So when my sister called me before dawn on Thanksgiving to send me to the garage, she wasn’t doing anything new.

She was doing the oldest thing in our family.

She was reminding me of my place.

What she didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that I had a place now that had nothing to do with them, that I had earned it in rooms they’ll never see, and that the woman she was ordering onto a concrete floor had stopped, some years ago, needing my sister to think well of her at all.

“It’s temporary,” she said.