“And Kiki — if Monique calls angry, do not answer angry.” I almost smiled.

“That sounds like something you’d say when we were twelve.” “It worked then,” she said.

I carried the blue folder home while the iced tea went on sweating its rings into their table.

My parents’ table has a long history of difficult conversations held over sweating glasses of iced tea; it is where we were told things as children and where we told them things as adults, and the rhythm of it has not changed in forty years.

My father cleans his glasses instead of interrupting.