Her mother's dishes were a hodgepodge, but Melody never didn't notice until Clover began to complain. Dishes, to Melody, were something you ate from, and then tried to get out of washing when it was your turn. At least, you tried to put off doing them, if you couldn't actually shirk the job. She had her favorites, the ones she liked to eat and drink from: she liked the plate with the pears painted on it, and the biggest jelly jar. But Clover hated them all. There were tin plates from India, and mismatched old china, coffee mugs and jelly jars and anodized aluminum drinking glasses that sweated when they held cold liquids. Most of the serving dishes were Tupperware. The utensils were all sizes and shapes and thicknesses. Melody had learned to be careful to choose a spoon carefully when she ate ice cream, so it wouldn't bend. But Clover hated them all, because Clover loved beautiful things, and believed that the dishes should match. It didn't matter whether they were usable, it matter how they looked. Their mother spent money on things like books, but not on dishes, and not on her clothes. Not on the things she called "functional". The argument ran for more than a year, Clover complaining with increasing frequency, until one evening she screamed:

"Don't you know how embarrassing this is? I can't even have my friends over for dinner!"

As a brag, Clover showed Melody pictures of the apartment in New York once, when she returned from one of her yearly summer visits. Her stepmother had perfect furnishings and dishes, and everything else. Melody wasn't impressed, although she knew from her sister's behavior that she was supposed to be. The pictures did explain why, when Clover came back to Lawrence, she always battled their mother. Melody liked to watch the fights, for entertainment. Clover was the only one who could make her mother angry.

"It's embarrassing," Clover yelled. "You'd think we lived in a trailer."

"If that's the sort of thing you're learning in New York, I have to talk to Owen. You're learning false values."

"You're crazy! Why does everything have to be ugly? It's all -- " she looked around, as if to point, but there was too much to point to, "It's all tacky. It hurts to look at it. Like living in Mississippi."

The signal that Ada was about to get angry, the two red marks, showed on her cheekbones.

"Please go to your room," she said. "We'll talk when you calm down."

Clover stormed upstairs and Melody heard her door slam. Clover was probably glad to be alone. She was always embarrassed when she showed emotion.

Ada sat at the table with Wyatt and Melody. Gabriel had left when Clover first started to shout. "What do you think?" Ada asked.

"I think you two should settle your own problems," Wyatt said, "and leave me out of it."

She turned to Melody. "Am I being unfair?"

What was Melody supposed to know? She was eleven years old. She cared about dancing, and sports, and horses, and her Daddy. She looked at him. He shrugged his eyebrows. "I don't know," she said.

Ada thought it over, and decided that if Clover cared that much, she'd give in. She told her she could have nice plates and utensils, but Clover would have to pay for half, and the spending limit was a thousand dollars. Clover was fifteen, and she didn't have any money. She spent most of her allowance on clothes: black ankle-length cardigans, slacks and matching blouses; elegant things. The next few days she gave her mother the silent treatment. Then she started calculating how to get the money. Melody saw the wheels turning in her sister's head. Clover was always the shrewd one. Before three more days had passed she was all sweetness. She was even nice to Melody, which was rare.

Ada wasn't fond of Christmas -- she called it "a feast of commerce" -- but she accepted the holiday for the sake of the children. "It's so commercial," Melody heard her say, every year. But their mother stayed tuned to the family frequency, noting the things the children admired or mentioned, so she would be able to buy them gifts they liked. That year she noticed that Owen hadn't sent Clover an extravagant gift.

Two days before Christmas she spoke to Clover. They were in the hall, and Melody listened from inside the door of her bedroom.

"I'm sorry," Ada said. "I called your father the other day, and he said he mailed your gift. It's a busy time of year for the Post Office -- "

"I already got it," Clover said.

"But there hasn't been any package."

"I'll show you later."

Melody wondered about this for a while, but in the excitement of the season, soon forgot. She loved everything about Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, but most of all Christmas. She liked the people hurrying on the streets, and the special music you didn't hear at other times of the year, and the creche in the park. She liked shopping for gifts, and she saved her allowance for several months before, and spent every evening looking at catalogs, and wandering through stores, trying to find exactly the right gifts for everyone. She liked the family trip to the city the day after Christmas break started, to see the Plaza Christmas lights, and shop there, and go ice skating at Crown Center. She liked the fires in the fireplace. She liked visiting Muddy in her house, and eating the special dinner she made them, between Christmas day and New Year's. Most of all, she liked Christmas trees, and going with her father and brother to Buzz's land, where there were a dozen acres of forest. Every year, Buzz let them choose any tree they wanted. The first time they went, got lost, and it seemed forever before her father found her, though he assured her it was only fifteen minutes. Then he told her the story of her sister hiding in the rainforest, and she laughed. The next year, he gave her a whistle to blow, in case she wandered away, and he took an air horn, but she was more careful to stay near him. He always let her and Gabriel choose the tree, except the year they wanted one that was too crooked. When they'd picked the tree, he would cut it, and they would all carry it back to his truck, and bring it home, and set it up. Then he would help her and Gabriel decorate it. Every year he gave her a new ornament for the tree: baubles made of glass, or a fabric unicorn, or brass angels. The rest of the year she kept these in a box in her room.

The year of the dishes was like any other for Melody. All the traditions she loved happened in their usual routine, they were kept without a flaw, except one: Clover had no elaborate, expensive gift from her father. Melody always looked forward to seeing what it would be, and was invariably envious. It was the dissonant note in her own Christmas, but part of the ritual.

Christmas day Clover waited until everyone had opened their gifts, and took a check from her pocket and gave it to her mother.

"Five hundred dollars?" Ada said. "Owen is being very generous. What are you planning for the money?"

"Spend it on the place settings," Clover said. She had to explain, because Ada had forgotten about the plates and silver. Almost four months had gone by. Ada looked at Wyatt.

"You lose," he said.

She frowned. "Is that the appropriate term?" She turned to Clover. "All right. If you'll endorse this over to me, I'll deposit it tomorrow and we can start looking. It's certainly the right time. Everything will be marked down in price."

Melody went along to watch. First they drove into the city, to a store Clover loved on the Plaza. She wanted a certain Wedgwood pattern, but the price was too high. She did the math in her head. "I can only get four settings," she complained. "There won't be anything left over for silver and crystal."

"Honey, I don't think you have enough for silver and crystal," Ada said.

"Maybe if we waited until my birthday?" she asked. "I could ask for money again."

"A thousand is the limit. You'll get better values now, anyway. It's the after-Christmas sale."

Melody felt sorry for her sister. Clover looked like she'd been cheated, and couldn't get justice.

"If you want to spend more money, it can't come from Owen," Ada said. "You'll have to earn it."

"How? I can't get a job. I'm only fifteen."

"You'll think of something. Maybe you can tutor other students in math."

"That would take forever."

"What about this?" Ada held up a plate that was plain white except a simple blue ring around the edge.

It was too simple for Clover's taste. The store had nothing affordable that she liked, and neither did the other nice stores, at any rate nothing that would come in at the right price for six settings and leave money for silver and glasses, and gravy boats and other incidentals. Melody grew tired, trooping from store to store. Shopping as a waste of time, and now her mother and sister were spending an entire day looking at dishes, of all things. There hadn't been any fireworks from Clover, and without that for entertainment, Melody was bored. She regretted not accepting her friend Pilar's invitation to spend the day -- Pilar had a television, and her mother, who was from Spain, made special wonderful snacks this time of year.

She began wandering off to look at other departments. The second time, her mother told her she wouldn't be coming the next day, if she disappeared again. So Melody waited a bit, and went to the bathroom and stayed there as long as she could stand the monotony of the stall.

"Where were you?" Ada asked. "I was terrified. I've had the guards looking for you."

"In the bathroom. I had to go."

"Next time, tell me first."

Melody stayed home the next day: she'd tricked her mother into leaving her, but before she went to Pilar's she listened to Ada telling Clover that the offer expired when the stores closed that evening: "I can't spend any more time on this. I have too many other things to do."

The two of them went to the factory outlet north of the river, in Lawrence. Clover got half a dozen place settings, including salad plates, and a gravy boat and most of the other things she wanted, but they weren't a name brand, and they were a bit plain. She had to settle for simple glasses, rather than crystal, and stainless steel instead of silver. When they sat down to eat that evening, she sighed. Some of the food was still being served in Tupperware. She hadn't gotten enough serving dishes. Melody expected her sister to start complaining again soon, trying to wear her mother down and change her mind, but Clover never brought the subject up again.

Clover hated living in east Lawrence, among run-down houses and people without money. She wanted to live with Muddy. Muddy was the children's name for Nina. Gabriel had given her the name when he was too tiny to pronounce "Grandmother". She'd taken him and Melody as her grandchildren, just like Clover, giving them presents on their birthdays and at Christmas, and treating them the same. She gave the children birthday parties, every year, and the birthday child was allowed to bring four friends. There were party favors for everyone, and always a magician to put on a show.

"Your mother's too busy," she said to Melody once. "This makes it easy for her." Then she leaned down and whispered. "The real reason is, I like to. I'm bored, and you children are fun."

Clover's birthday was in June, and she loved going to Muddy's house for her party, because it was a big house in a part of town where all the houses were beautiful, and the lawns and gardens were immaculate, and the owners kept their perfect expensive cars inside their garages instead of their rusty heaps on the street. Clover liked the big house, and the furniture, and she would walk through, running her hand over the old sideboard and the walnut mantlepiece and the oak panelling. She would look at the paintings, and admire the prisms from the leaded-glass windows. Her favorite place was the rose garden in the back yard. She and Ada always walked through the garden together before the party started. Melody liked to watch them through the kitchen window, pointing out to each other the colors and shapes of the blooms, bending to sniff the scents, feeling the petals, slowly walking the rows. They shared those roses the way the family shared evening meals. They looked very different from each other: Ada short and haphazardly dressed, Clover tall and with her slacks always perfectly pressed. Ada with her punk-rock hair, short and spiky and red; Clover with her beautiful auburn hair, thick and smooth and never a strand out of place, that fell below her shoulder blades. Ada pale, Clover dark. But they were the same degree of thinness. Melody would remember this, when she had left the family, how thin and flat-chested they both were, so different from the robust way her own body turned out.

Coming home from those trips to Muddy's, the mother and daughter talked to each other again, their disputes forgotten. In a day or two Clover would go silent and retreat to her collection of antique dolls and her calligraphy and her ironing board and her math books. Ada would look wistfully after her when Clover came home and drifted up the stairs with a "hello", and she'd ask her to help in the kitchen. But Clover would claim homework -- a winner with her mother, who loved to see the children study. Clover was the lost child. Melody knew that her mother felt closer to Gabriel, and even to Melody herself, as much trouble as she got into.