Tommy was nine years old and possessed a creative spirit that far surpassed his practical skills. He had emptied an entire box of cereal—the expensive kind, the kind the rest of us carefully rationed—into a saucepan, added milk, and turned on the stove. He was stirring it with a wooden spoon, wearing our mother’s apron, which trailed on the floor behind him, when Lila walked in and froze.
“What,” Lila said, “is that?”
“Breakfast soup,” Tommy announced, with complete dignity.
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is now. I invented it.”
Phoebe appeared in the doorway behind Lila, glanced at the bubbling, steaming saucepan, and announced that she was seriously going to throw up. Sybil hopped in from the hall, shoe in hand, yelling that someone had moved her other shoe and she needed it in the next 30 seconds or she was going to be late, and it was someone’s fault, probably Adam’s. Ethan and Adam were facing off in the living room doorway in that particular stance of brothers about to fight over something extremely stupid, which turned out to be a gray sweatshirt that neither of them owned and had ever owned, but which they had both apparently decided they needed. Little Benji appeared from the hallway, dragging his tattered blue blanket like a sleepy ghost, one eye open, the other tightly closed, navigating by pure instinct.
