Meanwhile, the older Gabby got, the more pensive and chubby she became. She was, and I say this with love, a total Pokémon-loving, nerdy Trapper Keeper–clutching sad sack. Mopey in a most unsympathetic way. Not only was she not making jokes, she wasn’t laughing at the jokes of others. To me at the time, this was a heinous offense, a grievous wrong. What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?

Every time I saw Gabby on one of our forced monthly family dates, which usually took place in a Denny’s that was right next door to a Goodwill on Hawthorne Boulevard, at which, over the years, I purchased many a natty men’s shirt, she seemed less alive, more grayed out. Once I cornered her in the hallway outside the bathroom of the Denny’s and asked if Mom’s new boyfriend was molesting her, but this seemed not to be the case. She became so offended she refused to speak to me for months and would sit through our meals silent and bored as my mom gave me the latest gossip from the hair salon where she had gotten a job. The new boyfriend had sent her to cosmetology school. Fancy fancy.

When I brought up to Aunt Deedee the possibility that all was not right in that house, that Gabby was officially failing to thrive, Deedee swatted the air in front of her face as though there were gnats, and said, “Some things you just have to accept.” I did not know if she meant that my little sister should accept my mother’s craving for love alloyed with violence, or if she meant that I should accept that my sister and I were now on separate trains on diverging tracks, experiencing different childhoods that would lead us to different adulthoods, and were helpless to do anything other than wave through the window as we passed each other. “Gabby wanted to move in with her. Viv’s her mother. Can’t do anything about that.”

Latent in this observation was the fact that my mother had a legal right to my sister and was exercising it in a way she had chosen not to exercise it over me. Whatever conversations my aunt had had with my mother I had not been privy to, so I did not know if my aunt had begged for me to stay with her, or if my mother had begged her to keep me.

Regardless, my time in North Shore had not included many excursions to the neighboring towns, and I had rarely been to Manhattan Beach, even though it was only five minutes by car, and I was shocked that a place could be even more visibly affluent than North Shore. The main drag was crowded with boutiques and gastropubs, every house was built up two or three stories, every square inch of the lot covered, and the only cars on the road were BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, Bentleys, Maseratis. Everything glittered. Mr. Lampert’s car smelled of leather and stale french fries as we glided through the dusk. Bunny and I both sat in the back as though he were our chauffeur, but mainly because the front passenger seat was covered in trash, papers, and fast-food containers, and maybe as many as thirty empty Muscle Milk bottles.

Ray kept up a steady patter, talking to Bunny about his business dealings, and asking me questions about myself that I found alarming. In interactions with my own parents and aunt, I had perfected a series of what I thought of as “prey behaviors” that included careful lack of eye contact, silence, and unobtrusiveness bordering on invisibility, but none of this deterred Ray Lampert, who had questions about my shirt (Did I know that he had actually been to a Nirvana concert back in the day?), whether I played sports (You should, everyone should, even if they weren’t good at it, because it taught you about life), my eyeliner (Young people were so much more free these days, and wasn’t that a good thing? He, for one, supported my wearing eyeliner if I chose to).

Bunny did not react to any of this as though it were unusual and looked placidly out her window at the lighted facades of glamorous homes flashing by, though she did reach her hand out again and lace her fingers through mine. While this gesture was unquestionably overly intimate, my little sister had also been a hand-holder, and so I squeezed Bunny’s hand in little pulses as I had Gabby’s, and she squeezed mine back, though otherwise we did not address each other but spoke only to her father as he quizzed us about our teenage lives.

The Chinese restaurant, casual and merrily chintzy in a way I found deeply reassuring, was almost empty, and we took the largest corner wraparound booth, even though we were only a party of three. I did not know what to order and felt anxious about pronouncing things correctly, but Ray Lampert was the kind of man who loved to order without consulting others, and he gave the waitress a long list of dishes, ordered a Tom Collins for himself and two Shirley Temples for Bunny and me. I had never had a Shirley Temple before, though as a child I had coveted them, and, while it was so syrupy it made my teeth itch, to possess one now caused my stomach to continually rise within my torso like a helium balloon bumping along the ceiling.

“I’ve been reading,” Mr. Lampert said, “about the founding of the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA, and you know, back then rockets were considered sci-fi, and basically they were just these three guys, amateurs, who were obsessed with rockets. They spent two years just trying to launch a rocket, you know, but they had to invent rocket fuel basically, in order to make a rocket. And they wound up working with this expert at Caltech, who said, you know what, you guys are going about this in the right way, I’ll help you and you can use some of my grad students. They used to call themselves the ‘Suicide Squad’ because the open joke was that they were probably going to blow themselves up. But they did it, they successfully launched a rocket, about the size of a soda can, and that was that, and they got absorbed by the Department of Defense. But none of the generals would take seriously anything with the word ‘rocket’ in it, because it sounded too sci-fi, so they became the Jet Propulsion Lab, because that way they could get funded. Then after the Second World War, the government said: Do you want to be a defense company or do you want to join this new thing we’re starting, called NASA? And they opted for NASA.”

“Wow,” Bunny said, though she was clearly bored and not really listening.

“Can you imagine that?” Ray Lampert said, and ordered another drink from the waitress before continuing, “Just three guys obsessed with rockets, no background in aerospace, and they wind up part of NASA? Just monkeys shooting shit at the moon. Wild, you know?”

“Wow, you’re like a little museum in person form!” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, though I did find it genuinely interesting.

“Oh, not really,” Ray said, waving away what I’d said as though it were a compliment. “I never went to college, you know that? But no one, I mean, aside from the founders, but I’m saying in contemporary times, I’ve had a really unparalleled influence on the town. I mean, I really can’t think of another single individual who has more directly influenced the development of the town in the last twenty years. I got the new high school built, I got the building code changed so now we finally have some development. Did you know I’m behind that new Italian place that opened up on Main? I convinced the chef to move there, I said, ‘Screw L.A., I’ve got rich people who don’t want to drive to get decent pasta, live the good life, put your kids in decent schools,’ you know what I mean? Were you born in North Shore?”