Aunt Karen looked a lot like Mary Ann’s mom, but she also didn’t. Mary Ann couldn’t help thinking that the features that had looked lovingly chiseled on her mother looked on Karen like they’d been tossed like a jacket over a bedroom chair. It was the kind of spontaneous observation that Mary Ann caught herself making, a ruthless evaluation of female aesthetics that, she realized, came from not an inflated devotion to beauty but a resigned cynicism, a veteran’s indelible awareness of the ways of the world. Karen had always looked, even younger, just some indefinable something shy of pretty. It was only when she stood next to her sister that the connection became painfully evident, like when you look at the thin, ghostly pencil lines of a sketch next to the finished painting and realize that yes, I guess that bit there did look like a horse’s leg, and oh, that’s what those weblike things were. The sad thing about it, of course, being that the finished canvas had been lost over ten years ago, and the sketch was all that was left for people to make sense of. Her and Mary Ann, who looked even more beautiful than her mom.