Chapter 1

The kitchen was dark when Frances Andersen came down at 5:40, and she liked it that way. This was the only time of day when the house belonged to her.

She picked up the dense weight of the cast-iron skillet and lifted it up as she briefly imagined using it as a war hammer against the head of her boss, the principal at the high school where she worked. She sighed at the pleasant thought, before laying it down on the burner to heat up. She placed six strips of bacon in a fan across the iron and cracked four eggs into a bowl as the fat began to whisper.

Her mind could wander because her hands knew the work of three thousand mornings. The bowl went to the left of the stove, the whisk to the right, the bread into the toaster on the first pass so it would be warm but not brittle by the time the eggs came off. She did not think about any of it. Familiar tasks she just did. Unusual tasks made it to the list.

The list lived on the refrigerator door, in her own neat block capitals. Beside it hung the family calendar, color-coded. Celeste was blue. Carrie was green. Tim was red, though his column was mostly empty because Tim’s schedule lived on Tim’s phone and the family was expected to work around it. Frances’s was black ink, and black ink was everywhere, filling the gaps between the colors like mortar between bricks.

Frances pulled four lunch containers from the cabinet, each person’s labeled with a strip of masking tape. Celeste’s had a second strip underneath, no mayo, because Celeste had decided in October that mayonnaise was disgusting and Frances had learned not to argue about it. She laid out bread, chicken breasts she had grilled last night and sliced after the girls went to bed, two apples, and two bags of potato chips. Two water bottles from the freezer. She poured the eggs into the pan.

Behind her, Tim came into the kitchen with his head face-first into his phone. He was a tall man, still broad through the shoulders from his swimming days, though the shoulders had rounded a little in the years since. His hair was going grey at the temples in a way that looked distinguished. He was wearing the Italian leather shoes she had taken to be resoled last month.

“Morning,” she said.

He returned a grunt. She had learned, over seventeen years, to grade his grunts, and this one was benign. He sat at the table and she put the plate in front of him: three strips of bacon, half the eggs, two pieces of toast. She set her own plate across from him and sat.

“Big day?” she asked.

“Mm.” His thumb moved across the screen. “Board deck. AI is hitting our security products hard, and our only response is to invest in significantly more tokens for our programmers. It’s like an arms race. Rafferty wants the numbers reworked before ten.”

“Do you want me to—”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Celeste has a game Friday,” she tried. “If you wanted to come, it’s at home. Six thirty.”

“Friday.” He looked up for the first time, though not at her. He was looking at the calendar on the refrigerator. “I’ve got a teleconference with the Chicago people Friday. Might run late.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah.” He finished his toast in two bites and stood, chair scraping. “There’s a dry cleaning ticket on my dresser. If you’re out.”

“I’ll get it.”

“Great.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek, already turning toward the door. “Bye.”

Frances went back to the lunches. Chicken for Carrie, who ate anything. Chicken on sourdough for Celeste, no mayo, lettuce on the side in its own small container because wilted lettuce was also disgusting. Fruit. Chips. Napkins. She packed the containers into the insulated bags, blue and green, and set them by the door.

She ran through the week in her head. After school: chess club, then the gym, because the junior varsity girls’ basketball coach had a sick mother in Toledo, and someone had to be an adult in the building during practice, and that someone had been Frances since Thanksgiving. History club was Wednesday. Robotics was Thursday, which she did not understand and did not pretend to, but a faculty member had to sit with the group and the physics teacher had a baby a few weeks ago. Friday, Celeste’s game.

Saturday morning was the SCA at the university. It was the only line on the whole calendar that she had written in black ink for herself. She was teaching the new members to use a shield for offense, to bash with the boss, and to hook an opponent’s weapon to create an opening.

Carrie’s permission slip for the field trip was in the green bag, signed. Celeste’s physical form for spring sports was on the counter, waiting for the paediatrician to fax it back. The dry cleaning. The oil change on the Highlander was eight hundred miles overdue. Her mother’s birthday was Sunday and she had not bought a card.

She wrote card on the list and underlined it.

Celeste came down with her hair wet and her face lit from below by her phone screen. She was sixteen and had Frances’s height and Tim’s long swimmer’s frame. She opened the refrigerator, took out the milk, and poured cereal without looking.

“Morning, sweetheart.”

“Mm.” Celeste sat. Her thumbs moved. “Did you do my lunch?”

“By the door.”

Celeste glanced over. “Is it the chicken again?”

“It’s chicken.”

“Mom.” The syllable carried a whole paragraph. “I had chicken Friday. I had chicken, like, Wednesday.”

“You asked for chicken.”

“I asked for it once.” Celeste shoveled cereal. “Maddie’s mom does, like, sushi. She does those rice balls with the seaweed. Could you just, I don’t know, could you look something up? You can find it online. It’s not hard.”

Frances had sliced the chicken at 10:30 the night before, standing at the counter with her reading glasses on because her eyes were too tired to focus.

“I’ll look,” she said.

Carrie came down a few minutes later, quietly, as she did everything. She was fourteen and still looked it, her hair in the braid Frances had taught her last summer. She poured cereal, sat beside her sister, ate. As usual, Carrie didn’t say anything, but simply took the green bag from the hook by the door and slung it over her shoulder along with her backpack and stood waiting while Celeste finished.

“Oh,” Celeste said, standing. “Friday, I’ve got the game, but we are going out afterward, so you will need to stay longer.”