Twenty of those photos hang in a hallway of my house now, in order, from three babies too small to sit up on their own beside a twenty-three-year-old who had no idea what he was doing, all the way to three twenty-year-old women standing beside a man well into his forties.
Our mother never once reached out in all that time. Some years, especially the busy ones, I genuinely forgot the girls were my sisters and not my daughters. It stopped mattering which word technically applied a long time before this past June.
