All that day as she waited for her sister to come home, Maxine remembered the goats. She did not know what it was that had nudged them into her mind -- there was nothing remotely goat-like, or even countryish, about her sister’s house or the neighborhood -- but once the image presented itself of the white faces, the angular slit-mouths emitting their treble bleats, she could not get rid of it.

They’d been given the goats the spring Maxine was eleven and Tillie nine. Tillie went by Tildra now; she corrected anyone who tried to use the nickname, even Maxine, which Maxine considered cheeky because she was here, after all, to do her sister a favor. But back then, in upstate Crete, New York, they had been Max and Tillie and didn’t think twice about what they were called. Together they settled on the names Pete and Smiley for the two goats, which their father had waiting as a surprise in a pen he’d built behind the garage. Their father was an insurance salesman, not a carpenter or a farmer, and on the first night of the goats’ residence with the Wrynn family, they escaped and died on Route 12. Mr. Wrynn, his lips set in a line, fastened the fence where Pete and Smiley had pushed through and told Max and Tillie that they would try again, but with just one goat this time. The new one they named Clover, and she lasted a week before dying of a deficiency of Vitamin E.

Not uncommon, said their neighbor Fran Bardwell, who worked for the only vet in Crete.

Then why didn’t anyone tell us? demanded Mr. Wrynn. Maxine thought of the way her father had been down on his knees in the goat grass, holding Clover’s dead head. I would have bought her Vitamin E by the barrel. He leaned forward to look into the animal’s vacated eyes. “Goddammit.” Although Maxine was young, she knew when her father believed he had failed. It was less an expression on his face or the way he held his body than an odor he gave off -- something rancid and poisonous, his blood or skin souring on the inside of him, like milk turning in the quart. He often began projects with enthusiasm, like the time he started building a darkroom before he realized he couldn’t bring running water into the basement, and the time he tried to help Sammy Lash build a car for the soapbox derby but forgot to leave room for the seat. Maxine believed that the smell her father gave off, in the aftermath of these disasters, was the scent of his own self-disgust. Whenever she got a whiff of it, she stayed away.

By the time Tillie pulled into the driveway, Maxine had started her niece, Isabelle, on her five o’clock feeding. She thought Tillie would want to take her, so she started to get up and hand her over, but Tillie waved and whispered, “Go ahead, she looks comfy. Besides, I have to pee.” Maxine kept the bottle in the baby’s mouth and listened to Tillie use the bathroom and change her clothes. When she came out of the bedroom, she’d traded her heels for slippers and her receptionist’s dress for a sweatshirt and jeans. It was a point of pride with Tillie that she had been able to get into her jeans a week after the baby was born. Max had always been the big-boned one, like their father; Tillie took after their mother’s more delicate side. From the looks of the two sisters, you’d guess Max was the one who had recently borne a child.

Maxine’s own version of pride would not let her show Tillie that the difference between their sizes bothered her. Since they’d been teenagers, whenever they shopped for clothes together, she held in her head the comments that wanted to break free, like I am disgusting and My thighs make me want to barf. She always bit her tongue after failing to fit into a pair of pants she’d selected, and smiled as if grateful when Tillie said she’d go look for the next larger size.

But the sisters were twenty-four and twenty-six years old now, and other subjects had joined clothing and bodies as things worthy of their concern. Tillie was a mother. Maxine had had a few bad years out of college, when she’d depended on her parents for money to augment what she made as a temp, and during that time she’d tried half-heartedly (some pills, some whiskey, but not enough of either) to kill herself, which her parents didn’t know. Tillie, when she found out, called Maxine an idiot. “You of all people should be glad you’re alive,” she said. She was referring to the fact that Maxine had been diagnosed, in eighth grade, with a benign lump on her frontal lobe. The benign part was what she usually left out when she told the story, along with the fact that from the beginning, the doctor had referred to it as a cyst. Maxine herself used the word growth, knowing full well what it implied. She knew it was wrong, but she got so much out of telling people and watching their eyes grow wide: a tumor? On your brain? They always treated her tenderly, with more kindness, after they knew. Maxine wondered what other people used, once they were out of school and grown up, to get such attention and sympathy. Or maybe some people didn’t try; she suspected that one was supposed to relish being an adult, and not look for ways to be taken care of, but she couldn’t imagine feeling this way herself. Though they’d never discussed such things, she knew Tillie couldn’t imagine it, either; and Maxine worried about her niece, who was only an infant now but would, in a few years’ time, be competing with her own mother for nurturance from the world.

Now Tillie stopped off at the kitchen to pour herself a rum and Diet Coke before flopping on the other end of the sofa to watch her daughter being fed. “How was she?” she asked Maxine, her eyes betraying an ecstatic wince as the first sip slid down. “I was going to call, but the goddamn phone never stopped ringing.”

“Don’t you get a lunch break?”

“Of course. But it’s only half an hour. I mean, by the time I scarf down a yogurt and use the john — “ Then Tillie’s eyes narrowed as she watched her sister’s face, and she put her glass down hard on the puckered cover of the TV Guide. “What?” she demanded of Maxine. “Why do you look at me that way? Okay, I know it, I should have called. But it was busy, Max. And I trust you. It’s not like I didn’t think about her or anything.” When Maxine remained silent, Tillie stood up and reached to snatch the baby away from her. “Jesus! Screw you, Maxine. You can shove that holier-than-thou attitude straight up your born-again ass.” With anybody else, she would have used the word fuck instead of screw. But there was still something in her that remembered she was the younger sister, and so she held back at the last moment, afraid to show how far she had strayed from where, in life, they had started.

The baby, having lost her hold on the rubber nipple, was crying. Maxine got up and walked over to the window. She was accustomed to the faraway, third-floor view she had from her attic apartment outside Boston, but here everything swam smack up against you, life-size, as if you were in a submarine too close to the reef. Tillie’s neighborhood made her feel spooked, with its square plots and painted mailboxes, and all the houses in the development constructed according to one of two styles; directly across the street was the mirror image of Tillie’s, and the houses on both next-door sides of her, 12 and 16 Woodhaven Circle, were duplicates of her Number 14. When she was a child, Max had read a science fiction book about a suburban neighborhood she’d imagined looked just like this. In the book, all the children playing outside bounced balls in unison, and every jump-rope slapped the pavement at exactly the same time. During this week she’d spent at Tillie’s, Maxine felt as if she’d been living inside that book.

She turned suddenly from the window. “Hey, do you remember those goats?” she said.

Tillie was jiggling the baby, trying to pat out a burp. “What goats?” She spoke crossly, as if she hadn’t noticed the change of subject or Maxine’s conciliatory tone.

“The goats Dad got us when we were kids. You must remember. You weren’t so young, then -- you were in fourth grade. Come on: that little pen he built out behind the garage?” Though she sometimes believed her sister made faces because she liked to be looked at, Maxine saw that this time Tillie’s expression of puzzlement was for real. “I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

“My whole childhood is pretty much one big blank,” said Tillie. After a pause she added, “Except for the stuff I told you about Dad.”

“Yeah, well.” Maxine returned to the sofa, where she sat down hard and looked Tillie straight in the eyes. “That -- “ she pointed at her sister -- “is total horseshit.”

“Ha!” Tillie snorted, which made the baby laugh. “Now who has a mouth like a sewer.”

“And I’m not born-again.” Maxine reached over and took a gulp of her sister’s drink, to prove it. “Just because I go to church.”

The church she went to was one of those with a long name that didn’t say exactly what it believed in, only that it embraced all faiths, and that every genuine seeker was welcome to its pews. Maxine was drawn in one Sunday in January, a year and a half earlier, when she happened to walk by the door as she struggled to carry the Sunday paper while blowing onto her freezing hands. She caught sight of a sign taped to the door -- It is warm inside -- and, intending only to regain her balance and shift the load in her arms, she opened the door against a blast of wind and felt herself being whooshed through.

From the hall she heard the singing of children and peeked around the corner into the sanctuary. An usher saw her and held out an order of service, and not wanting to disrupt or be rude, Maxine accepted it and sat down. The children were singing a song, the chorus each time in a different language she didn’t understand, but she could tell from the inflection and their faces that it was some kind of hymn. When the children finished, the congregation applauded. Maxine had never heard clapping in a church, except at weddings when the couple kissed, and the sound, on a regular Sunday morning, made her start. At the benediction she tried to sneak out, but the people on either side of her reached to take her hand. She stood there stupidly as everyone else, joined by similar squeezes throughout the room, murmured words Maxine did not hear so much as feel. She followed everyone to the coffee hour, where she made five new friends -- three of whom she’d told, by the time she left, about her brain tumor. In March she became a member, and last October she’d been one of four lay speakers to give sermons about the relationship of spirituality to their individual lives. A service of testimony, it was called. The woman who signed her up said Maxine could talk about anything she wanted, but she was sure that everyone would be interested in hearing how her faith had been tested by a critical illness. What she had learned by confronting her own death. Maxine could not tell her, of course, that there had never been a time when she believed that her cyst would kill her. It was more of a nuisance than a threat. Maxine often wished -- though she hardly dared to acknowledge it, even to herself -- that it had been more serious; that she could honestly consider it a mortal struggle she had survived.

She went to the library and took out books by people who did have real cancer, and after she delivered her remarks from the lectern at the plain wooden altar, she had to remind herself that what she’d said was a lie. But then she told herself, No. Not a lie; just someone else’s story. Did it matter who it had happened to, as long as it was the truth? In this way she allowed herself not to feel guilty, and to accept what she saw in people’s eyes when they came up to her at coffee hour and expressed their appreciation and concern. “We’re so glad you came through all that, that you’re here with us,” one of them told her. “You’re so courageous, so strong.”

“Not really,” Maxine demurred. But all along she knew that they would take it for modesty.

                  ~

On Saturday, Max and Tillie packed up for the drive north to their parents’ house -- their childhood home -- where Max had left her car before taking the train down to Pennsylvania the previous week. Their parents hadn’t met their granddaughter yet. Tillie’s husband couldn’t come because he had to work weekends. Besides, he and Maxine had never gotten along very well -- he thought she looked down on him because he had never gone to college, and while she knew it was petty of her, this was true. She thought she was better at hiding it, though, than apparently she was.

“I bet Mom got Isabelle a christening gown,” Maxine said, trying to sound casual as they walked back to the car after stopping for lunch on the Thruway. “She probably thinks it’ll change your mind.” As she spoke, she held a hand over the baby’s forehead to shield it from the June sun.

“That’s her problem.” Tillie fastened the car seat with a vicious click. “Max, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you listen, or is there something inside there that just erases everything you hear?” Speeding, Tillie tapped a finger at her own head. Her small thigh jiggled on the seat.

“I didn’t erase it. I just think you’re wrong. I mean, I know you are. Dad wasn’t like that. Isn’t.” “Well, maybe not in the daytime.” Tillie floored it to pass a truck.

“Not ever. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I mean, I know you believe it. I’m not saying you’re lying or anything.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don’t be like that, Til. Okay? I think you’re confused. And I’m not saying that therapist planted it, either. But what you’re remembering isn’t real.” Maxine let out her breath. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding it in so long. “Besides, even if it was true -- like, say, in another family or something -- it would be the father’s fault. Why punish the mother? You know how much Mom wanted to throw a christening party.”

“She can still have a party. She can show off Isabelle all she wants. But I’m not standing up in a church with some guy who raped me and letting him say a prayer on my baby’s head.” Tillie’s voice rang on in the car long after she’d finished speaking. A police car went by flashing lights but no siren, which made Maxine nervous. Silent emergencies were the most dangerous kind.

“That’s a terrible word,” she said finally. “Rape.”

Tillie made a scoffing noise. “No shit.”

“I mean, the word itself. It’s horrible. It hurts just to hear it.”

“Then how do you think I feel?” Though the air-conditioning was on, Tillie rolled down the window to suck in some air. She drove like that, with her head halfway out of the car, until Maxine said “Hey, what’s the matter with you?” and from this weird distance her sister answered, “You think I don’t take care of my daughter? You wait and see.”

From the Thruway they exited onto Route 20, and rising with the altitude as the traffic thinned, they went home. Their parents lived on Sully Hill Road; the turnoff landmark was a silo with a robin’s-egg-blue roof. On Sully Hill, the houses were set far back from the road, and each house was hidden from the others by wild grass and trees. Tillie parked next to their father’s Chrysler and carried the baby in while Maxine managed to follow with all the bags.

The house they grew up in smelled, as it always had, like sausage cooking. Her mother never cooked sausage that Maxine could remember, but there it was, anyway -- the warm, vaguely broiled scent that stuck to the ceilings and the walls, the paint and upholstery, the air they all breathed, in and out of each other’s lungs. When she lived there, of course, she hadn’t noticed. But when you went away and came back, there it was. It was that family smell of high spirits and misery, celebration and bitterness, comfort and dread. Maxine drank deep with her eyes closed, then thought she might vomit. Leaning forward to kiss her father, letting him hold her close in a hug, she tried to imagine this same weight above her in a bed: an adult man lying on top of her as a child, and what this would feel like -- suffocating, titanic, in its very proportions absurd. She knew it had never happened. Yet Tillie was sure that it had. If he did it to me, Max, then why wouldn’t he do it to you?

They’d been sitting in the therapist’s office when her sister asked her this. The therapist was one of the reasons Tillie had wanted Maxine to come to Pennsylvania. She was a slight, dark woman who sat with her pant-suited ankles arranged in an elegant X. Across from the two of them, Maxine felt like the odd one out. Anyone would have taken the therapist for Tillie’s sister, the blood relation. Maxine could have been an in-law or even a stranger. Of all the confidences in the room, she saw that whatever the therapist and Tillie held between them would support the most weight.

“You’re wrong, Til,” she’d said, knowing that the therapist and Tillie would exchange glances. She could hear the echo of their thoughts bubbling above her: Deny, deny. “I know this is what people are into, now. Repressed memory and all that. But haven’t you read about the mistakes? Whole families get ruined. Somebody thinks a thing is true, then they find out later it isn’t. It’s a phenomenon. A vision or something, but you think it’s real.” The more she talked, the more the two other women receded from her view, until she and Tillie were in the car again on their way back to Tillie’s house. “I think it’s really sad that you could believe those things,” she remembers saying, as she separates now from her father to give her mother a hug. She saw them six days ago, but in this family they always greet each other as if it has been a long time.

Her mother takes the baby from Tillie, and Maxine watches her sister accept their father’s hello, the kiss and tobacco embrace. He’s a medium-sized man with shadows under his eyes, where he winces and smiles. When they were little, he used to make his girls laugh by shifting these eyes back and forth to look like a crazy man. They would giggle until they nearly peed.

Now, after letting Tillie go -- and is Maxine mistaken, or does he hold her sister longer than he did her? Is she nuts to feel jealous? -- he reaches over to stroke the baby under her chin. Only Max perceives the tension in Tillie when he does this, and the way Tillie directs her mother’s attention to something outside the window, so that the baby will have to be moved. She hears her mother say the word “church” and sees Tillie shaking her head, and her mother says, “Well, okay. Let’s have a nice visit,” and they all go into the kitchen and sit down. Max gets ready for Tillie to make a scene -- a confrontation, like those she has seen on TV, in which grown children accuse their parents of abuse and betrayals a long time ago. The parents always bite their lips, shake their heads and protest, but the audience knows what’s true.

Tillie has promised Maxine she won’t do this, though. “I’m not interested in having it out with him,” she said, on the way home from the therapist. “I don’t see him that much. He’ll be dead someday, and until then I can put up with him on holidays and whatever. I don’t want to do that to Mom. It would kill her, and besides, she wouldn’t believe me.” At the time, Maxine decided not to point out to her sister that this didn’t make sense; if her mother didn’t believe what Tillie said, how could it kill her? She decided to feel only her relief, which is what comes back to her as she spoons up the fake-crabmeat salad and takes more crackers than her share from the common plate.

After lunch, Tillie wants to lie down for a nap with the baby, but their mother asks if it can be put off for an hour. There’s a sale on at Twice Around, the store that sells “gently worn” children’s clothing, and if they go now they might find some nice bargains. Tillie consents but insists on driving, and they pull out with a rush of wheels that Maxine knows, hearing it, will cause her mother to brace herself against the dash.

Still at the table, nursing his Sanka, her father tells her that he’s been meaning for a while to clean out the garage. Does Maxine want to help? Of course she doesn’t, but she says she will. There are things she wants to find out about him that only he can tell.

But he asked her only so that he would have company, which Maxine discovers, with relief, when she goes out to the garage and finds the lawn chair he’s set up for her at the edge of the yard; that way they can talk while he works, and at the same time she can relax. She fixes her gaze on the meadow across the road. When she was little, she thought of it as what heaven must look like, the way the sun lights the grass in sudden circles, as if angels are touching it with wands. Between her fingers she squeezes an old tennis ball as she watches her father begin to sort through piles of junk, tossing it onto the floor in a resounding flurry of dust.

“How’s work?” he says finally, and Maxine knows that he really did not remember having asked the same thing less than a week ago, or what her answer was.

“Okay.” The last time, she’d gone on to tell her parents about her job working for the editor of a literary magazine. Someday, if the editor ever leaves, she might have a chance to move up; for now is the assistant, and though it doesn’t pay well, she loves the work. It feels important. There have been times in her life when the only thing that saved her was a book. Her favorite task in her job is reading through the fiction submissions. If she likes them she passes them on to a second reader, higher up. If she doesn’t, she gets to send the rejection slips, on which she scribbles encouraging messages like “Sorry this isn’t right for us” or “Please try again.”

“I’ve never really understood the point of fiction,” her mother said, during that conversation, and Max thought, How did I come out of her? “I like books about real life.”

“Yeah, we know what you like, Amy,” her father had said, and the three of them smiled because it was a joke that her mother’s favorite genre was true crime, especially cases of family members murdering one another.

Maxine knows her parents worry about where she will land in life. They disapprove when she talks about going to graduate school, giving up her regular paycheck. Once you found something with security, you’re supposed to stay. It would be different if you were married, honey. She doesn’t need to hear that again. Instead she says to her father, “How’s yours?” meaning his job.

“Me?” He pauses in ripping a box open and looks up surprised. “It’s fine, I guess. What can I tell you?” He shrugs. “Nothing very exciting about the insurance game.” He tosses the balled-up tape toward a bucket in the corner. In the end, Maxine knows, her father cleaning out the garage means only that he will move things from one place to another; he’s never been able to throw anything away. “Do you do everything there? I mean, all kinds? Like property and fire and stuff? Or do you just handle life?” Maxine’s heart speeds up as she practices asking her father questions. The felt of the tennis ball comes apart in her hands.

He laughs. “I can’t believe you really want to know a thing like that,” he tells her, wiping grime into the side of his pants, “after all these years. But okay. Well, we all have our little specialties. Remember Ned Houghtaling, with the nose? He’s strictly auto. Anything involving a car, it goes straight to him. I used to do a little of everything else, but now they mostly give me the real-estate policies. Homeowners and such. Honey, you can’t possibly care.” Maxine realizes he’s caught her staring, way out across the valley to the long bruise-stitch of peak and sky.

“Yes. I do,” she says. “Wait a minute. Ned Houghtaling?” She sees her father stiffen, but she doesn’t comprehend why until it’s too late. “Isn’t he the one you were going to start your own agency with?” Only then does she realize she should not have brought it up. Her father lets out the cch sound she associates with those moments, over the years, in which he recognized that another of his ambitions was destined to fail.

“That never worked out,” he answers her, muttering down at his shirt. To change the subject, he rummages deep in the box before him. When she sees what he has excavated and holds up to the sunlight, she hears herself gasp.

“You want to hang onto this?” he asks. It is the final X-ray from after her brain surgery, bare ghosts of skull photo-gleaming in gray. “As a souvenir?”

To answer she reaches up and takes it from him, punches the heavy plastic into a clumsy fold, and tucks it under the lawn chair’s metal leg. She pauses in letting her memory touch something that scratches, familiar, at the back of her mind. “It reminds me of this novel where this guy falls in love with a woman in a TB clinic, they’re both patients, and when she gets better and leaves, she gives her X-ray to him as a present. So that’s all he has left of her -- this, like, negative of her insides -- but he carries it around with him and keeps taking it out to look at, after she’s gone.”

Her father smiles. “I know that book,” he says. “Don’t think you’re the only one in this family who reads,” he adds, and along with the teasing there is a serious note in his voice.

“Oh, Dad, I don’t.” Maxine flushes and leans forward. “I just never thought -- I mean, we never talked about it or anything. I never see you read.”

“Well, I do it mostly in bed. At night.” Her father has stopped working to take a rest. He looks out at the place, miles away, where a few years ago the town assessor was killed by his son in a hunting accident. When the police arrived, the son had shot off his own big toe, out of guilt. “The Magic Mountain. Right? I thought of that book when Mom and I first saw this house. I always loved the feel of the hospital he describes -- how they were all way above the rest of the world, wrapped up in their blankets and beds. Remember how the guy went just for a few days, at the beginning, to visit his cousin? Then the longer he stayed there, the more he didn’t want to leave.”

Maxine watches her father and bites her lip. “I know. I loved it, too,” she says. She wants to cry out, “Dad, did you ever touch Tillie?” (the word “rape” is impossible), but she cannot.

Her father burrowed farther into the box. With his face half-hidden, as if it embarrasses him, he says, “Yeah, you’re like me. Me and you, we’re the types, if we were up in that clinic we’d only come down to the real world kicking and screaming. Mom and Tillie, I think, are the other way. They’d never let themselves get sucked into that kind of fear.” He straightens with empty hands as Maxine looks down at her bare wide thighs, wanting to scratch them until they bleed. Her father gestures at the X-ray she is anchoring with her weight. “I’m a little surprised you don’t want to get rid of that. Once and for all. Good riddance, that kind of thing.”

“Well, it wasn’t really such a big deal.” Maxine feels breathless, though she isn’t sure why. She tosses the tennis ball down the driveway, waiting for her father to contradict her as it bounces away. “What do you mean, not a big deal?” He steps out from the shadow of the garage and stands over her, and she tries to think of it as sinister, a menace, but it won’t work -- again comes the image of her father kneeling in the grass on that long-ago spring morning, wishing he’d been able to save the last dead goat. “You get cancer, honey, that’s a big deal, I don’t care what book you’re reading.” He’s trying to make light of it, a joke, but she sees that his lip trembles around the words.

“But Dad. I didn’t have cancer.” A seize curls inside her. He often has to be reminded about little things, but how could he have forgotten something as important as this?

Her father flips his sunglasses back down over his eyes, but she can still sense what lies behind them. He is looking at her with a blend of hesitation and regret. “Actually, honey -- Jeez, your mother would kill me for telling you like this.” He sucks in air as if it were courage. “But it was malignant, that tumor. I was all for telling you then, but Mom thought it would be better if you didn’t know.” He waits, watching her. She can see through the dark plastic that he doesn’t blink. “What are you talking about?” She is astonished to feel laughter rise.

He sighs and comes closer. “I always told her it was a mistake to deceive you, and the doctors did, too. But I went along with it. She convinced me it would be better for you not to get scared. We were scared. It was scary. I mean, you want your kids to be okay.” He coughs, as if to expel this memory from where it’s been lodged many years. “Then when they got it all, and said things looked good, I thought, well, what the hell? Maybe Amy was right.

“Actually, I thought it would have come up before now,” he went on, as Maxine continues laughing. He doesn’t show surprise yet at her reaction -- he seems distracted by what he has to say. “It’s part of your medical records, of course. I assumed a doctor or a nurse by now would have said something, and you’d find out that way.” He pauses to allow Maxine a chance to answer, but she thinks it best not to tell him that she hasn’t been to a doctor in years, because her job doesn’t carry insurance. When she remains silent, he picks up where he left off. “Your mother and I always planned to sit down with you and have this talk, but we just never did. I kept expecting a phone call from you some day, or an out of the blue visit, with you yelling at us for not telling you the truth. Every time we’d see a scene like that on TV, I’d say, See? That’s going to be us and Maxie, when she finds out what we did.” He reaches up to brush part of a cobweb from his face. “I’m relieved, actually. Now that it’s out in the open. What’s so funny?” Finally he lifts his sunglasses to look at her. Maxine is doubled over in the lawn chair. She’s tried to stop laughing for a while, and to get up, but has succeeded at neither.

“Oh, God,” she says finally, exhaling the last blasts in little sighs. “It’s not funny. I can’t help it. It’s just that I was thinking of something else. Another question I wanted to ask you, but I get this instead. Oh, God.” A few leftover giggles find their way out.

Her father wipes his hands again and takes another step toward her. This time Maxine manages to stand, letting the chair topple as she stumbles, crunching the X-ray beneath her. “What?” he says, putting a hand out to steady her. “What did you want to ask me?” but she knows it will only upset him, she knows Tillie has to be wrong, so she shakes her head, kisses him, and tells him to never mind.

At dinner -- tuna casserole, peas, tomato slices, iced tea -- Maxine’s father says to Tillie and her mother, “What did you two buy in town today, anyway? I didn’t see any bags.”

Tillie and her mother looked at each other. “Well, we have a little news,” her mother said.

“We didn’t go to the store.” Tillie takes over, her tone defiant, as if she doesn’t trust her mother to tell it right. “We went to the church and got Isabelle baptized instead.”

“Baptized?” Her father says the word like someone who’s never heard it. He looks at Maxine confused, and she raises her eyebrows to show him that this is the first she’s known of it, too. “But why? I mean, why not do it tomorrow, at the regular service? The way we originally planned?”

Maxine bends intently over her plate. In the corner, her niece lies asleep in her carrier, no doubt worn out from being blessed.

“Dad, could we not get into it?” It is Tillie as a teenager, flush-templed and aggrieved. “It was just spur of the moment. I didn’t want a big deal -- all that stimulation and people passing her around. She’s a fussy baby.”

“Well, you were a fussy baby. That didn’t keep us from having you baptized in front of your own congregation. And what about Max and me?”

“It’s okay with me, Dad,” Maxine says. She wants to add, Who cares? Her parents don’t go to church much -- mostly at Christmas and Easter. But this baby’s baptism has been on their minds since before it was born. She suspects it has to do with hedging their bets about how Isabelle will turn out, given that Tillie’s husband grew up “LC,” which is her mother’s not so subtle shorthand for low class. “The church I go to,” Max adds, hoping to divert her father, “doesn’t even do baptisms. I mean, they have a service for babies, but it’s the same thing as when adults join. They call it a welcoming ritual. There’s no water or anything -- every new member just goes up to the front and stands there, and somebody gives them a rose.” She took a sip of tea and winced as the ice touches her teeth. “Anyway, about Isabelle -- I don’t mind. Not having been there, I mean.”

“Well, I do.” Her father puts his napkin down, stands and paces to the window, looking away from them all as he speaks. “It’s not something you take lightly, being baptized in the church. She’s a Christian now. She’ll go to heaven. And when she sins, she’ll be forgiven.”

Tillie coughs on something that’s gone down the wrong way. “Forgiven for what?” Now her whole face is red. “Listen, don’t think I actually believe any of that crap. I just did it for Mom. This baby has nothing to be forgiven for. Anyway, you should fucking talk.”

“Oh, please, just stop.” Her mother waves the tomato fork -- with impatience or sympathy, or perhaps disapproval of Tillie’s language, it isn’t clear. “I’m sorry, Hank. But if we hadn’t done it this way, it wouldn’t have been done. And isn’t the important thing, really, that it was?”

Her father looks at Tillie, who stares back at him refusing to break the gaze. “I just don’t get it,” he tells her.

Tillie snorts. “Yeah, no shit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He returns to the table, but doesn’t sit down. When she was little, Maxine used to play a game with herself. She’d look at someone around her -- a kid in her class, or a stranger at the grocery store -- and she’d try to imagine what that person was feeling. If the kid was raising his hand, Maxine thought about what it felt like to hold her own arm up in the air. If an old lady was picking through apples, she focused on the sensation of her own fingertips rubbing the smooth red skins. For just an instant, and this was the point of the game, she knew she was feeling exactly what they were. She would not have been able to name the satisfaction this gave her, or the relief. She knew only that it made her less afraid to be in the world.

But it has never worked with members of her own family, and it doesn’t work now, as she watches her father standing next to her and tries to imagine what it is like to stand on his legs, or rub the edge of the table with his knuckles, or look down at Tillie from his height. “What don’t I get?” he asks.

Maxine thinks Tillie is going to answer, and her stomach folds in fear. But at the moment her sister would have opened her mouth, their mother begins brushing crumbs from the table and the baby wakes up. Tillie goes over to get her, and their father sits back down and makes his crazy eyes at his granddaughter, who gapes back. He calls the baby Cutie, which was his pet name for Tillie when she was young. He reaches out toward Isabelle’s cheek. Tillie picks up the baby and turns her away. “Don’t call her Cutie,” she tells him. Her voice shoots blades.

Maxine watches her father’s hand drop. “Hey,” she says to him, urgency swelling at the back of her throat. “I was reminding Tillie this week about those goats you got us, but she doesn’t remember. What year was that? Weren’t we both around ten?” She addresses the question to her father because he was the one who bought the goats and brought them home.

“Goats?” He flashes a look at her and frowns. “No.”

“Oh, come on. Dad. You bought us two to begin with, but they broke out and got hit by cars. Then we had another one, and it died, too, but not because it escaped or anything; that one was sick.” Her mother says, “That does ring a vague bell with me, Hank. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” He puts his fork down with a clink. “What kind of an idiot would try to keep animals in that small a space? Besides, who do I look like, Old MacDonald?”

His wife gurgles laughter and he looks pleased.

“See?” Tillie says to Maxine. “I told you.”

“Dad?” Maxine wants to hit him in the chest -- not hard, just enough to startle him into remembering. “I know we had them. You built a pen behind the garage. Then, after they all died, you buried them back there.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know where you got this,” he tells her. “There weren’t any goats.”

“Maybe you’re thinking about the Bardwells, honey,” her mother suggests. “They might have raised some for 4-H.”

“I’m not thinking about the Bardwells.” Maxine tastes saliva souring in her mouth. She feels far away, and she speaks more loudly to bring herself back. “You guys, this isn’t funny.”

The three of them look at each other. Her father clears his throat and shrugs. “Well, okay. So we had goats once. Whatever you say, Maxie.” He is trying to sound amused.

“Why are you doing this to me?” She throws her napkin onto her plate, having lost all sense of how much it weighs. She had thought things might shatter.

“Honey, what do you expect us to say?” Her mother rises to clear the table. “I think Daddy would remember something like that. Besides, does it really matter? Why is it such a big deal?”

Maxine looks across the table at her sister, who smooths her baby’s invisible hair. Her father chews a tomato and her mother arranges cookies on a glass plate for dessert. “I’ll prove it to you,” Maxine tells them, not even recognizing her own voice. “After supper I’ll go out and dig their bones up behind the garage.”

Her mother sighs, carrying in the cookies. “It’s so muddy back there.”

Tillie adds, “You won’t find anything.”

Her father shrugs again. “Go ahead. If it makes you feel better.” He pushes a whole cookie into his mouth.

But when it comes time, Max knows, she won’t do it. She isn’t brave enough to take that chance. Can’t even the hardest things -- bones, teeth -- disintegrate in the dirt? Instead she lingers at the table with the rest of them, stirring sugar into her tea. On the morning she found Clover’s body, she was the first in the family to wake up. It was already hot, and she approached the pen with a dish of carrot shavings, calling Clover’s name. Before she ran into the house to get her father, she saw the goat lying there, and she stopped, blind, her head rushing away from her and the sound stuck in her throat, because in that moment she knew what it felt like to be dead.