Millie: Did anyone tell you what happened on Friday?
Tata: No.
Millie: No one knew where you were.
Tata: What? I had a wedding. Everyone knew about it.
Millie: No one knew a thing, but no one noticed you weren’t here until the afternoon. Everyone asked everyone, “Have you seen her?” and no one had. Finally, Gianna called Lupe at home and Lupe knew you were at a wedding.
Tata: I told you all about it. Don’t you remember how miserable I was?
Millie: You never said a word.
Tata: What are you talking about? I complained for months!
Millie: Nope.
Tata: Honest to God, my whole life needs subtitles.

Millie: So what happened?
Tata: Pete and I and my niece Lois drove down to the Tintin Falls Holiday Inn, where we met up with my sister Daria and her husband Tyler and our baby sister Dara and her new boyfriend Josh who looks just like Justin Bieber so all evening I kept asking, “What’s Justin’s name again?” That doesn’t go over as well as you might think.
Millie: I bet it doesn’t!
Tata: We got dressed in a room the size of prison cell and drove over to this barn on the beach at Long Branch, which is so corporate we checked the ocean for sponsors. The wedding took about fifteen minutes in a room overlooking the ocean that was set up for another wedding. I don’t know what we were doing there. Anyway, minutes later, we piled into cars and drove four miles back to the Holiday Inn. It was about 90 degrees, my AC’s broken and Route 36 was wall-to-wall construction, rush hour and shore traffic, so the ride took almost an hour, by which time my hair was a foot high. I pinned it down with a barrette but I looked like the Contadina lady’s mother-in-law in kitten heels.

Millie: I’m sure you looked fine.
Tata: I looked awful, but that’s not important. Daria has been very depressed, so at the cocktail hour, where we all dove face-first into gin & tonics, and we were joined by my Fabulous Ex-Husband and his current wife Karen, which could be traumatic except we love them. But there was this lull in the conversation and I picked up the camera and took pictures of myself. Daria said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I went to a wedding and had a great time. See? Here I am at the cocktail hour and here I am eating stuffed shells. There were other people at the wedding but they were in my way.” She was in a better mood after that.
Millie: How was the food?
Tata: It was okay, but that’s not important either. I can’t explain that. Anyway, the reception room was so cold people wrapped themselves in tablecloths. A year later, we had dinner. I looked up from my plate and Karen was wearing her napkin like a schmatta. There’s photographic evidence of my laughing in a public place. The whole thing was an expensive, silly ordeal and I complained about it for months. I can’t believe all the noise in my head never made it past my lips. The happy couple got married before my cousin got deployed to Iraq and now they’re pregnant, and why did we do this? The prime rib?

Millie: You never said a thing. I would have written your vacation day on the calendar.
Tata: It snowed formal wear! I wore two different pair of expensive, painful shoes!
Millie: You can keep a secret.
Tata: Nuh unh. Daria’s redecorating Facebook with photographic evidence as we speak.
Millie: That’s nice.
Tata: Yeah, she’s not good at crime.

Pete and I recently had a house guest from Los Angeles. After dinner, she made a beeline for the kitchen sink and the soapy dishpan I’d set up before we sat down. Washing up proved quick with everything in place, but I watched quietly from across the kitchen as she rinsed with even less water than I would have imagined possible. Ah, I thought, she lives in a desert. The rules are different. Then we got almost no rain for three weeks while, north and south of us, we saw Wrath of God storms speeding across weather maps. Lawns baked brown and trees lost their leaves. Bees get angry, and you just don’t want your bees angry.

I was raised by hippies and hairdressers, both of which cared about water conservation, though for different reasons. The former urged us kids to turn off the spigot because clean water is a finite commodity; the latter because water costs money, goddammit, and we are not made of money. I’m pretty careful with my resources, but not perfect. We use a rain barrel but could use three or four more. We are accustomed to water falling out of the sky every three or four days. When it stopped, we felt shitty and when it started again, better. I’ve been sick for two days and couldn’t get out of bed until 10 this morning. A full day of gentle rain? Bring it.

All of this is to say the rain caused me to look out the empty bedroom window. In June, I sat in the backyard, pitting cherries with an old plastic cherry pitter when – THWACK! – the pieces in my hands flew apart and the spring disappeared. The cherry pitter recently disintegrated in my hands a final time and I threw away little pieces of a former kitchen gadget. A paring knife turns out to pit faster anyhow, and we find so few of those on the roof.