For four years, Chloe was in my kitchen most weekends.

She came in through the back door without knocking.

She said hey Jessi, what’s for lunch — that exact sentence, so many hundreds of times that my daughter, at three, started saying it as a joke.

I taught her to make a roux.

I taught her to drive a stick shift in the lot behind the Methodist church, badly, over the course of one terrible summer.

I sat at my dining room table with her for nine hours across two weekends helping her put together college applications, because Patricia was overwhelmed and Marcus works nights and neither of them had ever done one.