He is currently working as an entry-level inventory clerk at a warehouse in South Austin, for an hourly wage.”

My mother took a quiet sip of her tea.

“And Chloe?” she asked.

“Two years of supervised probation,” Arthur said, more gently.

“Financial literacy courses.

And two hundred hours of community service, which the court ordered her to perform at a senior care facility, assisting elderly residents.” None of us said anything about the shape of that for a moment, but we all felt it, the quiet completeness of it, my sister ordered to spend her days caring for the elderly with her own hands, in the very way she had refused to care for her own mother.

I did think, when Arthur told us that part, about the strange education a court had just handed my sister, and I have wondered since whether any of it took.