“My lower back is already locked up from four minutes on that thin vinyl.”

“Did you look at Rosalie through the window?” I asked.

“Melissa has thirty people coming to her house Sunday afternoon,” Patricia said, her voice sharpening.

“She spent six hours setting up the tables in the backyard, and now she’s sitting on her living room floor in tears because nobody’s around to help her.”

“I had emergency surgery two days early, Mom,” I said.

“My blood pressure was two hundred.”