I was digging into my third bowl of Haagen Dazs chocolate chocolate chip when Darlene inched into the kitchen wielding a baseball bat.

"Hi, Darlene," I mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream.

The bat rattled to the tile floor and Darlene gave out a breathy little yelp before snapping on the overhead light.

"For Christ's sakes, April, what are you doing in here with the lights off? It's three in the morning."

Even in the middle of the night, in her flowered, flannel nightgown, my sister looked neat and businesslike, her blunt-cut blonde hair falling trimly into place, her complexion pale and clear, her posture straight, at forty, still the energetic, fresh-scrubbed senior class president. Darlene glanced at my bowl of ice cream, opened the freezer door to check out the contents and shook her head in exasperation.

"You know we've got a nine o'clock appointment with the probate guy," she said, dropping down into the white plastic chair across the table from me.

"We've been here three days and all you've done is eat."

She leaned over the table, folded her hands, and searched my face with our mother's perplexed stare -- as if something in my eyes or the turn of my mouth might explain why I was sitting in the dark, wearing a torn Spyro-Gyra t-shirt, doggedly making my way through yet another quart of Haagen Dazs.

Darlene and I were strangers, connected since I was ten, when she moved back east with Dad, by the thin thread of our mother's long distance narrative -- the boyfriends and husbands, graduations and honors, hirings and firings, marriages and divorces, abortions, and childbirths. The divorces, abortions and firings were mine; the graduations and honors, husband and children, were Darlene's. When Mom died, the narrative thread that had connected us for nearly thirty years had snapped and we were cautious and awkward, like classmates at a ten-year reunion.

"I couldn't sleep. I was hungry," I explained, as Darlene continued to eye me suspiciously. She glanced over at the refrigerator again, picked up the baseball bat and headed back to bed.

The meeting with the probate lawyer was technical and predictable. I gazed dully out the window after reading every word on each framed ivory certificate adorning the grey cloth walls. Darlene and Mr. Ivy League talked law school and Supreme Court appointments, the effect of the recession on summer associate programs, squash and racquet ball and exploding trusts.

I liked the idea of trust exploding and laughed out loud at that while Darlene looked at me as if I were a mental patient.

"You'll have to forgive my sister, Mr. Grauf," Darlene said, giving me her coldest stare of disapproval. "But, you know, the artistic temperament."

Mr. Probate, thin and pinched, his hair parted in the middle like a character from a Dickens novel, made a pyramid of his hands and nodded soberly.

When all the talking was done, I signed where I was told to sign and we blew out of there, Darlene exchanging business cards with Mr. Testamentary Trust, all corporate bonhomie.

Back at the house, Darlene was full of energy, a woman with a plan. "We'll just go from room to room, itemize, categorize, then meet back in the living room, and talk about the disposition." She actually used words like that -- "disposition."

"Disposition?" I repeated, raising my eyebrows.

"Disposition, disposition. Who gets what. You, me, Aunt Ruthie, cousin Carol, the Salvation Army. Stop playing dumb, April," Darlene snapped, handing me a fresh yellow legal pad with her law firm's name embossed on the top. "I'll start in the kitchen. You start in Mom's bedroom."

Darlene couldn't have chosen two rooms in the house that were farther apart. Nor could she have chosen an easier task for herself, a more difficult one for me. The kitchen had been remodeled three times since Darlene left home. But except for the sparkling cottage cheese plaster Mom sprayed on the ceiling a few years before, the master bedroom hadn't changed in thirty years.

I didn't have the energy to protest. What Darlene wanted always seemed like the right thing to do, no matter what it felt like.

"Fine by me," I responded, my second Bloody Mary of the morning in hand.

"And I wish you wouldn't drink in the morning," Darlene said.

"This isn't drinking, Darlene," I said, waving my celery stick over my head as I headed down the hallway. "This is eating. This is breakfast."

Mom's room still smelled of illness, of sour sweat-soaked sheets, rubbing alcohol, medication, and the sickening sweet smell of the elaborate floral arrangements sent by Mom's bridge club friends, the "girls" who never visited.

Because Darlene couldn't leave her law practice, couldn't desert Jim and the two kids, and because I had only a boyfriend, a temp word-processing job, and a fitful painting career, Darlene said the choice was obvious. I should move back to San Diego when Mom's emphysema threatened to take the last of her strength away.

"Jim and I will send you the little bit of money you're making at that temp job of yours and you can spend all your time painting, April," Darlene said. "It's perfect for you."

So I'd spent all spring in San Diego, in the room across the hallway from Mom's, in the same narrow bed I'd slept in as a child. Every night for three months, I lay tense in that bed, listening to Mom's jagged breath, wondering whether the next one would be her last, drifting off to sleep and jerking awake again, half expecting to see Darlene's still form lying under the covers in the bed across from me.

Aside from Darlene, all that seemed to be missing on those warm spring nights were the search lights that swept across the walls of our room when I was small, lulling me to sleep before the sounds of breaking furniture began drifting down the hallway. I could almost hear the sound of roller skates scraping on the sidewalks and the laughter of the teenagers who lived at the end of the block and didn't have to be in bed by eight.

Because ours was the first house in the neighborhood, the air had always smelled of sawdust and thrummed with the whir of a dozen electrical saws. It didn't occur to me until I moved back in to nurse Mom that the criss-cross of searchlights on my childhood ceiling had simply been advertising for the new car lots and appliance stores that were springing up like mushrooms on the long, wide boulevard just four blocks away. When I was five, I believed in those lights. I thought they were guarding me against enemy planes and atom bombs.