“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she told me the first time we met. Six years old, I was digging under a log, looking for worms. This was back when my father still had all his property, and I could walk for the whole afternoon without leaving his orange groves. I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, making up games, inventing friends to play with, since I really had none of my own, or looking for buried treasure. My sisters were all much older and hated to have me underfoot, so they’d draw fake maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, then send me off on quests. I fell for this sort of thing for years.

She was sitting in a tree, gently tapping an orange that hung near her face, making it swing. My imaginary friends were not the kind you could see. I figured her for a smart-aleck picker’s daughter, since it was nearing the end of the season and the groves were full of Guatemalans. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress with a furry kitten face on the front—I remember that very clearly, and remember wondering later how, if she didn’t exist, I could have made that up. Her skin was very dark. Her hair hung past her lap. She looked to be about my age. I ignored her.

Lifting the log up, I disturbed a nest of yellow jackets, which flew out, stinging my face and my neck and my hands. I could see her watching me while I slapped at them and yelled and cried. She said nothing but stood up on the branch and spread her wings out behind her, which amazed and frightened me. I tried to run home but could hardly breathe. I found a group of pickers having their lunch in the grass, and collapsed in front of them, swollen and squeaking.

She came to see me in the hospital. High on I.V. Benadryl, I told anyone who would listen that there was an angel in the room, and the doctors and nurses found that charming. Even back then I was a quick and subtle thinker when I was stoned, and by the time my father asked me about it I had figured out that it would be best to pretend not to know what he was talking about. But when we were alone, and she stood silently at the foot of my bed, looking strange not just on account of the wings but because she was dressed as a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. “I’m not that kind of angel,” she said.

Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters was pregnant—one very much augmented and on purpose, and the other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence, and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to blow through the phone tree and the two receptionists who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.

“Dad is sick,” Charlotte said.

“He’s been sick,” I said, because this had been going on for a year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell lung cancer, he’d been holding his own for months and months.

“Dad is sicker,” Christine said, and Carmen added, “Much sicker!” She is the eldest and the (barely) most pregnant.

“He’s in the hospital,” Christine said. “There’s an infection.”

“In his bladder,” Charlotte said. There are two years between each of them, but they’ve always seemed like triplets, all with their furrowed brows and disapproving hatchet mouths, all as tall and fair as I am short and dark, all with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color for staring a person down. My eyes, like my father’s, are nearly black, and Carmen says I can hide anything in them.

“A little cystitis,” I said. “So what?”

“Dr. Klar says he’s very ill,” Christine said.

“She doesn’t know if he’ll come out of the hospital,” Charlotte said.

“She always says that,” I said. “She never knows. She’s an alarmist. She’s a worrier.”

“You have to go!” they said all together.

“You have to go,” I said. “You go, if it matters so much.”

“We’re pregnant!” they said. And then the individual excuses: mild preëclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf for Carmen. They can’t travel from New York, where they live within waddling distance of one another.

“People travel when they’re eight months pregnant,” I said. “People do it all the time!” Though I knew that they didn’t, and now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.

“You’re a doctor,” they said, as if that should settle it, and I wanted to say that I’m impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I could have confessed right then, to them and to the whole world—I am an impaired physician—and then started down the yellow brick road to rehab.

Instead, I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking her head. She was dressed to shock, in a filthy housedress, with a plastic shopping bag on her head and a dead cat wrapped around each foot.

“I barely know him!” I shouted at her, but she didn’t respond. Then I told her I had a patient waiting, which she already knew, because there is nothing I’ve ever been able to hide from her.

“Put that lady and her evil children behind you,” she said, not looking up as I swept by her. She did not like Mrs. Fontaine for the obvious reason, but what she had against her two kids I could not figure out, though she has always done that—pointed out the ones that would grow into car thieves or lottery fixers or murderers, as if I were supposed to smother them with the great pillow of righteous prevention when they were six months old.

The Fontaines were waiting patiently in the exam room, Zebadiah splashing in the sink while his mother fed his sister and his aunt read Highlights. I locked the door, and Zebadiah toddled over to check it, an innocent part of our enterprise. “Baby,” Mrs. Fontaine said, meaning me and not her son, “how you been?”

“It’s been a rough day,” I said.

“Well, your friend has got just the thing for a rough day,” she said, and took a little foil-covered package from her diaper bag and laid it on the counter near the sink, and that is all we said about it, because one of our terms of business is a nearly silent sort of discretion. I put down my envelope and she took it, and when her package was in my pocket we talked about her babies.