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fact that she’d fallen out of friendship with Rita, but there didn’t seem to be anything either of them could do about it. Their lives had diverged radically; the alliance of soul they’d shared when they were younger was dead on the vine.
    Franklin, Rita’s son, came down the stairs, his footfalls weighted and clumsy. Without acknowledging the kitchen full of women, he stuck his head in the fridge. He wore a wrinkled dress shirt and pants with numerous pockets. He was lanky, with sharp, slight shoulders. Franklin had a driver’s license these days and didn’t seem to eat meals. He didn’t need anything from Rita anymore.
    After banging around for a minute, Franklin emerged from the fridge with a bag of lemons. He dumped them on a cutting board and began halving them with a cleaver.
    â€œFranklin,” Rita said. “Dare I ask?”
    â€œThey’re going rotten. The United States and Australia waste more food than the rest of the world combined. That’s something I learned just this morning, doing random Internet research. It may or may not be true. I don’t know what you bought these for, but they’re on their last legs.”
    â€œI’m aware they’re on their last legs,” Rita said. “That’s why I put them in the fridge. I was going to make pear butter, but I didn’t get around to it. For the walk-run.”
    â€œWell, what I’m going to do is take the lemons life gave us and make lemonade.”
    Rita picked up a heavy peppermill and cleaned a spot on it with her thumb. “I don’t think lemonade is a breakfast. Why don’t I make you some eggs? I’ll make over-easy eggs and rye toast like you like.”
    â€œBreakfast isn’t really my strong suit anymore,” said Franklin. He set the knife aside and squeezed a few of the lemon halves over a bowl. Hepaused and plopped in ice cubes, then found a spoon and fished out some seeds. “This day is starting off fun,” he said.
    Kim could remember Franklin as a small child. Rita and her husband had been worried about him, thinking he had Asperger’s or something. It had visibly pained him to look anyone in the eye, and for some reason he’d refused to ever say hello or goodbye. He still didn’t say hello, now that Kim thought about it. His verbal skills were always off the chart and he’d been a happy kid, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He’d shown no interest in the cartoons the other kids adored, no interest in playing hide-and-seek or tag, but then he’d take a puzzle over to a corner of the room and keep putting it together and taking it apart for hours, until someone stopped him.
    Somewhere along the line, he’d outgrown it. He’d learned to read people well enough. In grade school, they’d put him in a gifted class, and now he was in an expensive untraditional high school. The last time Kim visited, almost two years ago, he had been neck-deep in the collected letters of Vincent van Gogh. He’d found an enormous three-volume set at an estate sale, and was staying up nights with it. He’d sought Kim out one afternoon in the den, knowing she’d majored in Art History in college, and conducted a one-sided conversation with her in front of the cold, clean-scraped fireplace. He’d asked her unanswerable questions about the bond between siblings, made familiar accusations about the tastes of the public. Kim had asked him how he’d gotten interested in van Gogh’s letters and he’d said he didn’t think he was interested in them as much as hypnotized by their redundancy.
    â€œWe’re going to the outlets,” Rita was telling him. “Are you going to wear that shirt to school? It looks like you slept in it.”
    â€œI didn’t sleep in it,” he said. “Not last night.”
    â€œYou know where the iron is,” she said.
    Kim hoped Franklin didn’t lump her