MY LOOKS WERE NOT listed at the top of my admitted attributes. I wasn't ugly. I was dull: mousy hair and eyes in the same boring vein of brown, a palatably small nose and chin, and skin that refused to tint when the sun shined. My nerves popped like a breaker if the world saw too much of me, so the lack of a California tan had more to do with my jacket and jeans than my hereditary inability to be anything but a ghost.

     I was the plainest Jane.

      For Polly, there was too much of my father in me. She grieved this fact when the mood took her, usually at twilight on the back porch or at bedtime when the incandescent lightbulb in my bedside lamp crippled under the weighty darkness of the room. She said it like an apology—how a doctor might deliver terminal news to a patient—and I got the idea it was upsetting for little girls to resemble their fathers.

     "There's too much of him in you."

     She clung to that idea like a soldier raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the sole judgment she summed my life by. A single fact I couldn't escape. A dismissal she tacked on at the end of every discussion. A pink eraser she used to wipe away all flagrant lines outside her control. I wanted to pick my school outfit: You're just like your father. She caught me smoking in the barn: You're just like your father. Once, during an all-out argument, I said she was wrong. Wrong for how she treated me. Her emotional outliers tended to my existence with the same pseudo-kindness saved for bagboys or baristas. I was praised for my services, for brewing her morning coffee or bringing her lunch during her stint at the bank. But beyond those acts for her comfort, I was brusk, demanding, and unpleasant.

     "You only love me when you want something," I said.

     Those words earned me the most brutal "You're just like your father" I ever swallowed or had swallowed since.

     Polly froze me out after that. Her refusal to communicate in any form was an injury designed for infection. Wordless disapproval and contempt were dirty fingers she dug inside me daily, rooting for the bone. She glared at me during dinners and brushed by me in the mornings without recognition. I was a mosquito squeezed through the cross-hatch on the screendoor to annoy her, a weed growing where I was disallowed, and she withheld water to watch me wither.

     Asa, on the flip side, was different. He was comely and kind, two attributes that pleased Polly. Even his freckles were her doing, genetic offspring from the sprite-like dusting on her nose alone. She had no help in his creation. Popping out a little boy with fine-boned features and a heart stout enough to steal from was a choice conversation for her, usually, with the modifier "mini-me" slipped in at the start.

     Poor kid, he never stood a chance.

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