By September, Ruth had begun setting four plates again. Not every night, and not defiantly; she would take them out of the cupboard in a stack and discover the fourth only when she reached her mother's place. That evening I stopped her before she put it back. I had decided we needed a proper talk, something better than the few plain words I'd managed after Nadine moved out in August.
Tessa stayed standing beside the refrigerator. She had a schoolbook tucked under her arm and one finger holding her page. Ruth sat in Nadine's chair, which made my prepared explanation harder to begin. I had washed the supper dishes first, as though a clean kitchen could lend authority to whatever I said there. The dish towel was still over my shoulder when Tessa asked whether this was going to take long.
"Your mother and I are living in separate places for now," I said. "That doesn't change who your parents are. This is temporary, and we're going to keep things as normal as we can."
"You said that before," Tessa said. "What does temporary mean? Until Thanksgiving? Until I finish school?"
"It means not permanent."
"That's not a date." She laid her book on the counter without closing it. "You keep saying things like they're answers, but they aren't."
I nearly told her not to use that tone. It would have given me something familiar to correct, a small offense with rules I knew. Instead I took the towel off my shoulder and folded it. The girls watched my hands. I realized they had probably learned to watch those before trusting my face.
"You're right," I said. "I don't have a date. I shouldn't have made it sound as though I did."
Ruth drew one finger along a crack in the tabletop. "Does she have another family?"
The question was so far from the explanation in my head that I answered too quickly. "Of course not." Then I stopped, because the impatience had landed on her instead of on the thing she feared. "No, Ruth. She hasn't chosen another family. You're her children. She's still your mother, and I'm still married to her."
"Then why can't she sleep here?"
"There are grown-up circumstances that mean we need separate homes right now. I can't explain all of them. I can tell you this isn't something either of you caused, and it isn't something you're supposed to fix."
Tessa pulled out a chair at last, but she sat sideways, ready to leave. "Are you getting divorced?"
"We're legally separated. That isn't a divorce. I don't know everything that will happen between your mother and me, and I won't tell you I do." Saying it felt like taking a roof off over their heads. But Ruth stopped tracing the crack and looked straight at me, which she hadn't done through any of my reassurances.
"Who signs my reading sheet?" she asked.
"I do."
"And the school things? Because Mom used to remember."
There it was: the part I had hoped a speech would somehow settle. I reached for the pad beside the telephone and asked her to bring the notices from her bag. Tessa began to rise, then caught herself. She looked from Ruth to me.
"I'll do my own chores," she said. "And I'll help Ruth sometimes because she's my sister. But I'm not going to remember all her things, and I'm not going to be the other grown-up."
I had already been about to ask whether she could collect Ruth on an afternoon when my class preparations ran late. I heard the request now as she would have heard it, not as one favor but as the opening of a job nobody had asked her to accept.
"That's fair," I said. "If I need help, I'll ask about the particular thing. You can say you can't."
"Without you saying never mind in that voice?"
I knew the voice. Nadine knew it too. "I'll work on that."
Ruth brought three crumpled notices and a reading sheet. One required a signature the following morning. I signed it, copied the other dates, and put the papers into her bag myself. Tessa took her book upstairs. The fourth plate stayed on the counter until I put it away, and for once I didn't ask either girl what she thought her mother would want.