"It's in the dining room, Maren. It's been in the dining room for two months. We haven't eaten at the table since August. Did you notice that? Did anybody?"
"We never eat at the table."
"We used to."
"When? When did we used to eat at the table?" My voice had gone up. "Mom's never home. You're never home. You're upstairs walking back and forth in your room like a zoo animal. What table?"
She flinched, a little, when I said the thing about walking. I saw it. I didn't stop.
"You're jealous," I said. "That's all this is. You've been the smart one my whole entire life and for one month somebody looks at me instead and you can't stand it. You literally cannot stand it. You're nineteen and you're jealous of a sixteen-year-old with glue on her hands."
"Yeah," Krista said. "Okay. I'm jealous."
She said it too easily. That's another thing I noticed and didn't do anything with. She said it the way you'd say yes to a cashier asking if you want a bag. Like it didn't cost her anything, like it was the cheapest thing she could possibly say.
I started picking up the shingles. I don't know what I thought I was going to do with them. They were soaked through and most of them had torn again, and the gel medium had turned them gummy so they stuck to each other and to my fingers. I picked them up anyway and put them in a pile on the dry corner of the linoleum, one at a time, the way you'd pick up the beads of a broken necklace. I could feel Krista watching me from the stairs. Neither of us said anything for a long time. The refrigerator hummed and the clock over the stove made its loud plastic tick and outside on Twenty-Third Street somebody's car alarm went off and stopped.