The food’s ready by the time I get back to the kitchen, and I help Mom and Kevin move the serving dishes over to the dining room table so we can eat. The shelves are assembled now but not all of Mom’s stuff is put away, so things are cramped and awkward as we try to get everything ready. Cammie doesn’t offer to help; she actually doesn’t say anything at all. She stays in her chair, messing with her phone, until the three of us sit down with her.

“Cammie,” Mom says, smiling at her and holding out the bowl of black beans, “would you like some beans?”

“No.”

Mom’s smile falters. “Oh, okay.”

“I’ll have some, Mom,” I say, and she shoots me a grateful smile and passes me the bowl.

For the next few minutes, we don’t say much. There’s just the clinking of plates and cleared throats and quiet muttering to pass this or that. Mom looks like she wants to say something else but doesn’t know what, so she’s compensating by smiling so wide I can see all her teeth. Kevin’s really focused on his plate, probably because Mom accidentally made his gluten free enchilada recipe with flour tortillas. I eat a lot of chips and guac, because the enchiladas are burned on the edges (a sure sign Mom is nervous, because she never burns things) and I don’t like the sauce any- way. And Cammie watches my mother and me like we are aliens who have crash-landed in her life, which I guess in a way is true.

In the past, I’ve usually been the one eyeballing people like that at dinner, as Mom’s boyfriends and their families sat at our kitchen table and fed us their own bad food. It’s weird to be on the other side of things. I like it even less than I thought I would.

“So, Amber,” Kevin says, shooting a hopeful smile across the table at me once the silence has stretched beyond awkward and into uncomfortable territory. “I noticed Buffy has a KU collar. Does that mean that’s where you want to go to school next year?”

“Um…yeah.” I glance at my mom in time to see the corners of her mouth tighten in disapproval. But Kevin starts talking again before she can change the subject.

“I’m a Jayhawk, did you know that?” he asks. I shake my head and he nods. “Undergrad. Class of ’93.”

“Oh. That’s nice.” I don’t know what else to say except I don’t care. Which of course I can’t say, because that would go over about as well as the enchiladas.

“It is,” he says, and he sounds like he really means it. Weird. “That’s where Cam is planning to go for school too. Right, kiddo?” Cammie gives him a dirty look across the table. “I guess.”

Then she turns to my mother. “Did you know these enchiladas are burned?”

We don’t talk at all after that.

Finally, finally, we finish eating, and I start clearing plates off the table without any prompting from my mother, just to have something to do. I’m coming back to grab more when I hear Cammie say, “I’m gonna go.”

Kevin’s chair is facing me so I see his face as it falls. “But, sweetheart,” he says, “we talked about this.”

Cammie pushes her chair away from the table and gets up. Her added height is not very impressive since she’s so tiny, but the way she’s avoiding her dad’s gaze is. “I changed my mind,” she says. “I’m going back to Mom’s.”

She leaves without another word to any of us, slamming the door to the garage loudly as she goes.