By the time she got back to her room, her mother had opened her boxes and suitcases and begun putting things away. She’d also produced a small Madonna print and a set of red bull horns, neither of which Francesca would leave up after her mother left. “You don’t need to do that,” Francesca told her.

“Bah,” Sandra said. “It’s no problem.”

“Really,” Francesca said. “I can take care of it.”

Kathy laughed. “Why not just tell her you don’t like her going through your stuff?”

“I don’t like you going through my stuff, Ma.”

“I go through your stuff at home. Stuff? I hope this good school here will teach you not to talk like a dirty beatnik. And anyway, what are you trying to hide from me, eh?”

“Nothing.” Beatnik? “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not at home.”

Sandra looked up as if startled by a loud noise.

Then she sat herself down at Francesca’s desk and burst into tears.

“Now you’ve done it,” Kathy said, sitting up.

“You’re not helping any.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kathy said, and of course she was right: it’s not just yawning and laughter that can be contagious.

The twins teared up, then began to cry, too. They all three huddled together on the bed. It had been a terrible year. Grandpa Vito’s funeral, which had been rough on everyone. Then Uncle Carlo’s bizarre disappearance. Chip, the sweetest one in the family, getting called a name at school, snapping, and breaking the kid’s skull with his thermos. Yet there was only one other time the three of them had ever been like this: united, embracing, sobbing. The girls had been in Mr. Chromos’s math class. The principal came to get them and took them to his office without telling them why. Their mother was in there, her face red and puffy. She said, “It’s your father, there’s been an accident.” They all fell onto the principal’s smelly orange couch and sobbed for who knows how long. Now, sobbing together again, they must have thought of that day, too. Their sobs got louder, their breathing more ragged, their embrace tighter.

Finally they calmed and released their grasp. Sandra took a breath and said, “I only wish-” She couldn’t say the rest of it.

A sharp knock came at the door. Francesca looked up, expecting this to be the true first impression her dorm mother would have of her. Instead it was a couple, he in a powder blue suit and she in a poodle-cut hairdo, both smiling and sporting HELLO, MY NAME IS name tags.

“Excuse us,” said the man, whose name tag read BOB. “Is this Room 322?”

The number was painted in black on the door. His index finger was actually touching it.

“Yes, pardon us,” said the woman. They both had an extremely thick southern accent. Her nametag read BARBARA SUE (“BABS”). She was looking past them to the Madonna and frowning. “If y’all’d like us to come back later-”

“This is her room,” the man said, stepping aside and gently pushing a dark-skinned girl across the threshold. The girl kept her eyes on her Mary Janes.

“I believe we’re interrupting,” the woman said.

“Are we interrupting?” the man asked.

Sandra Corleone blew her nose. Kathy wiped her face on Francesca’s pillow. Francesca used her hand. “No,” she said. “No. Sorry. Come in.”

“Fantastic,” the man said. “I’m Reverend Kimball, this is my wife, Mrs. Kimball, this is our daughter Suzy. With a Z. Not short for Suzanne. Just Suzy. Say hello, Suzy.”

“Hello,” the girl said, and then looked back down at her shoes.

“We’re Baptist.” The man nodded toward the Madonna. “We have Catholics in Foley, though, the next town over. I played golf once with their leader. Father Ron.”

Francesca introduced herself and her family-pronouncing it Cor-lee-own, which even her mother did lately-and braced for a question about her name. It didn’t come.

Suzy looked from one sister to the other, visibly confused.

“Yes, we’re twins,” Kathy said. “That one’s your roommate. I go to another school.”

“Are you identical?” Suzy asked.

“No,” Kathy said.

Suzy looked even more confused.

“She’s kidding,” Francesca said. “Of course we’re identical.”

The man had noticed the bull horns. He touched them. Sure enough, they were real. “Suzy is an Indian,” he said, “like you folks.”

“She’s adopted,” whispered the woman.

“But not a Seminole,” he said, and laughed so loud everyone else in the room jumped.

“I don’t follow you,” Sandra said.

With a whiny sigh, the man stopped laughing. Suzy sat at what would be her desk and stared at its Formica top. Francesca wanted to give her flowers, wine, chocolate, whatever it would take to make her smile.

“ Florida State,” the man said. “They’re the Seminoles.” He pantomimed throwing a football. He laughed again, even louder, and stopped laughing, even more abruptly.

“Naturally they are,” Sandra said. “No, I mean about being an Indian. We’re Italian.”

The man and the woman exchanged a look. “Interesting,” he said. Inner-esting.

“Yes,” said his wife. “That’s different.”

Francesca apologized and said her mom and sister had to go but she’d be back in just a sec to help Suzy with her stuff.

Her mother flinched slightly at stuff, but of course did not correct Francesca in front of the Kimballs.

Francesca and Kathy held hands on the way out to the car. Neither one of them could, or needed to, say a word.

“Want me to drive, Ma?”

Sandra opened her purse, took out a handkerchief and her keys, tossed the keys to Kathy.

“Don’t get pregnant,” Kathy said.

Their mother let this go, did not even express feigned decorous shock.

I won’t become a WASP either, Francesca thought. Or a dumb blonde. Or anyone else’s sister. She squeezed Kathy’s hand. “Don’t wreck your eyes reading,” Francesca said.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Kathy said.

“Maybe I am you,” Francesca said.

It was an old joke. They’d always wondered how their mother had kept them straight as babies, always presumed they’d been mixed up a few times until they were old enough to assert their own identities.

They kissed each other on both cheeks, the way men would, and Kathy got into the car.

As Francesca hugged her mother good-bye, Sandra managed it at last. “I only wish,” she whispered, “that your father could be here to see this.” Sandra stepped back, triumphant. She looked from one daughter to the other. “His college girls.” She blew her nose. It was very loud.

“Pop never liked us to cry,” Francesca said.

“Who likes to see his family cry?” Kathy said.

“He wasn’t exactly one for tears himself,” Francesca said, wiping her face on the sleeve of her raincoat.

“Are you kidding?” her mother said. “Sonny? He was the biggest baby of us all. At movies he’d cry. Corny old Italian songs made him blubber like a baby. Don’t you remember?”

Seven years later, and Francesca was already starting not to.

She watched the Roadmaster nose its way through the clogged, narrow, palm-lined drive. As the car pulled around the corner, Francesca silently mouthed the word good-bye. She had no way of knowing this for sure, but she’d have bet her life her sister did the same.