The baby is screaming in her bassinet, more from anxiety than need, as five-year-old sister sings in spite of her — Barney's "Clean Up" song — while bouncing on the bed, carefully avoiding the broken plank in the box spring, decorating pockmarked walls with fingernail polish she stole from big sister's room in the middle of the night after sister snuck out the window for a late-night tryst with her best friend's much older boyfriend, a clandestine affair she does not yet know will result in a trip to the abortion clinic. In the master bedroom eight-year-old sister shakes Mother, harshly, since she has learned that gentle touches elicit no response, and moves back and forth between the bed and the window, where she keeps a watchful eye for Father's car on the horizon, where the road touches the sky about a mile in the distance, and the county line, though no sign is posted, is marked by the transition between smoothly finished roads and weather-gutted asphalt, a pathway of potholes leading to where their historic, too-big mansion slips slowly away, brick by brick, bottle by bottle, down the embankment into the river, and the basement is perpetually soggy.