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Augusta did not inherit her mother's patience or her predilection for acceptance. Her early upbringing among the boxes and bottles of her father's windowless prescription room had led her to believe that for every ailment, there was a certain cure. All it took was the proper formula and the right ingredients to concoct what was needed. In the wake of her mother's death, however, Augusta was forced for the first time to consider that medicine had its limitations. Her fourteen-year-old body vibrated with ceaseless outrage. How could she have been so misled?

And then, not long after Irene Stern passed, the first injection of a new diabetes medication called insulin was successfully administered to a boy in Canada. Before her mother was diagnosed, Augusta had never heard of diabetes. And now—now that her mother was lost—the news- papers were suddenly full of stories of people who had the same disease. Except that those people were being saved—not because they were smarter or more worthy, but simply because they had better timing. As it turned out, Augusta had not been misled. The scientists and doctors had simply been slow.

Augusta was happy the boy lived, of course, but as a motherless adolescent girl, she ached at the unfairness of it all. Irene Stern had been funny and kind. She had sung her daughters lullabies before bed every night. She had drawn them silly pictures and braided their hair. She had taken them to Coney Island to swim—instructing Bess, her elder daughter, to raise her arms high and reminding Augusta to lift her head and breathe. Irene continued to sing and braid and swim for as long as her body allowed, but in the end, she could not survive the storm her illness had become. Meanwhile, people like the Canadian boy skipped through the very same deluge as if it were barely a drizzle.

When Augusta fumed over the injustice, Bess reminded her of their mother's last moments. "Mama didn't want us to be angry," Bess said. "She would have been pleased that the drug was helping to make people well."

Augusta knew her sister was right, but that didn't make the articles any easier to read. Their father explained that insulin wasn't exactly a drug, but some sort of biological substance that their mother's body had failed to produce. Whatever it was, it was saving people's lives. Pharmacies like her father's did not stock it yet, but Solomon Stern assured his daughters that one day, very soon, they would.

His pronouncement was made with hope and awe, braided with a bitterness that Augusta recognized as identical to her own.

* * *

Most days, immediately after school, both Augusta and Bess reported for work at their father's store. They navigated the crowds on the avenues—past the stores selling men's suits and women's hats; past the banks and the cobblers and the stationery shops; past the carcasses that hung like so many trophies in the kosher butcher's windows. Wherever they walked, the sidewalks were packed. The Sterns had moved to Brownsville from the Lower East Side immediately after Bess was born—a move made by those who were lucky enough to afford bigger homes, brighter light, and better air. But every year Brownsville grew shabbier and more crowded, more like the place they had left behind.

When the girls got to Stern's Pharmacy on the corner, with its window displays of bottles and brushes and its red-and-white Coca-Cola sign, they remembered their mother's repeated instructions to neaten their hair and smooth their skirts before stepping even one foot inside. "Once you go through that door," she used to say, "the customers will look to you. I want them to know that your father and I raised polite, intelligent, and well-groomed young ladies."

Augusta was kept busy tidying shelves and dusting the displays in the storefront windows, while Bess was allowed to work behind the cosmetics counter, helping customers choose face powder and perfume. Augusta could not care less about makeup, but she resented the fact that Bess was given what was viewed as a more important task.

"I want more responsibility," Augusta told her father one night after they'd finished dinner. Dinners had become forgettable affairs—meat that Bess left in the oven too long or sandwiches they slapped together at the table. Gone were the days of their mother's roast chicken, with its golden-crisp skin, herbed carrots, and beans. Gone were the days of tangy meatloaf, whipped potatoes, and freshly baked rolls. Gone was the cheerful gathering at the table, their mother's laughter, their father's smiles. Meals were no longer something to be savored.

"A fourteen-year-old can't work behind the makeup counter," said Bess.

"I don't want to sell makeup," said Augusta. "But even if I did, age shouldn't matter. What should matter is intelligence and maturity." She turned to her father, who was busying himself with the evening newspaper. "Isn't that right, Papa?"

"Hmm?" said their father, his head buried deep within the pages, pretending he hadn't heard the question. Since their mother's death, Solomon Stern's jet-black hair had dulled to a wispy silver-gray, and the pillowy skin beneath his eyes sagged even more than the unstarched collar of his shirt or the pale green sofa on which the three of them sat. Since Augusta's mother's death, everything in the apartment drooped with grief.

Augusta knew that her father was still stuck in the quicksand of his sorrow. At the store, he managed to keep up with his duties. But at home, he had a more difficult time. There was a barrier between him and his daughters now, as if he were standing behind a screen—one sheer enough so that they could see him, but opaque enough to blur all his edges.

"No woman wants a child's opinion on lipstick," interrupted Bess, who had recently grown confident in both her retail skills and her burgeoning feminine charms.