Karen had brought the boxes from Dallas, flattened, in the trunk of her car, along with a roll of packing tape and three markers, one red, one green, one black. By eight in the morning she had assembled a box for each marker and lined them up across the kitchen floor like a firing squad. KEEP. GIVE. TOSS.

"We'll go cabinet by cabinet," she said. "Left to right. Nobody leaves the kitchen until the kitchen is done."

Beth was still in her bathrobe. She lived eleven minutes away and had driven over every morning for two years, first to check on Mother and then to take care of her, and she had not yet gotten used to coming in the back door without calling hello. She stood holding her coffee and looking at the boxes.

"You can't toss the kitchen," she said.

"Nobody's tossing the kitchen. We're tossing what's in it."

"That's what the kitchen is."

Robin, the youngest, sat at the table with her knees drawn up in her chair the way their mother had always told her not to, and said nothing, which was what Robin did in the mornings, and in the afternoons, and at Christmas. She had flown in from Portland on Thursday with one carry-on bag, as if she meant to stay a shorter time than her sisters, or wanted them to think so.

Karen opened the first cabinet. It was the Tupperware.

There was a great deal of it. It had been accumulating, by Karen's estimate, since the Johnson administration, and it was arranged according to a system that had died with their mother: bowls nested in bowls, lids stacked by color, the orange ones that nobody had seen in use since 1979 kept in the back, as if in reserve for some emergency that required the color orange. Karen took out an armload and set it on the counter. A lid fell and rolled under the table, and all three of them watched it go.

"Give," said Karen, and dropped the armload into the green box.

Beth took a bowl back out. "This is the one she made the potato salad in."

"Beth, they're all the one she made the potato salad in."

"No, they're not. This one has the little crack on the rim. She'd never use it for anything else, because the crack would let the air in, and she said potato salad didn't care."

Karen looked at the bowl, and at her sister, and Beth could see her deciding whether this was the hill. Karen was the oldest, and she had been deciding which hills to die on since she was seven.

"Keep," Karen said finally, and wrote POTATO SALAD on a strip of masking tape and stuck it to the side, as if otherwise someone might use it for something else.

They did the cabinets in an hour and a half. Glasses: give, except the four jelly glasses with the cartoon characters, which Beth wanted and Karen pretended not to see her take. Pans: Beth. The good roaster: a long silence, then Karen, because she was the one who did Thanksgiving now. Spices: toss, all of them. Some of the spices were older than Robin. The paprika had gone the color of brick dust.

Then Karen opened the drawer by the telephone.

Every kitchen has the drawer. Theirs had rubber bands, twist ties, a church bulletin, birthday candles in four colors, a screwdriver with a yellow handle, keys to nothing, a book of stamps with an eagle on them, and a coupon for a free car wash that expired in 1986. Karen began to dump it into the black box, and stopped, because under the coupon there was a stack of paper held together with a binder clip, two inches thick.

Robin put her feet on the floor.

They were grocery lists. Hundreds of them, on the backs of envelopes and the margins of bulletins and on the little pads the bank gave away, in their mother's slanted hand, and they went back years. Milk, eggs, Karen's cereal (NOT the sugar one). Birthday candles — how old is Bethie, 9? 10?? Liver for Daddy, ugh. Get the good coffee, Robin home Sat.

"Why would she keep these?" Karen said.

Nobody answered her. Robin had come around the table and was reading over her shoulder. After a while she reached out, took the top half of the stack, and sat down on the kitchen floor beside the boxes to go through it, one list at a time, the way you'd read letters.

It was the first thing Robin had picked up since she came home.

What worked: Everybody loved the junk drawer and the grocery lists. Nellie said the line about the potato salad bowl was the best thing I'd read all year and that she had one just like it. Tim said he could tell the three sisters apart without the dialogue tags, which in a book about three sisters is apparently not easy. Elma liked the boxes "lined up like a firing squad," and said it told her everything about Karen before she opened her mouth.

What didn't: Robin is still too quiet. Melinda pointed out that she has three lines in four chapters, and that her silence is starting to read like the author forgot about her rather than like a choice. Noah counted the things in the junk drawer (eight) and asked whether we needed all of them. We didn't, quite. Two people thought the last line was too neat, and two people thought it was the best line in the scene, so I've kept it for now and will let it fight it out in the third draft.

What I changed: Robin now gets one sharp line about the Tupperware, and the paprika is gone. I'm sorry about the paprika. I liked the paprika.

By the third hour of jury selection, Robert Fajardo had stopped listening to what the panel said and started watching what they did.

Thirty years had taught him that people will tell a courtroom almost anything except the truth about themselves. They will tell you they can be fair. They will tell you they have no opinion about the police, or bankers, or young men with tattoos on their knuckles. They believe it when they say it. But they cannot help how they sit.

Juror number seven sat with her purse on her lap and both hands on top of it.

That was not unusual by itself. Half the women on any panel did it. What caught him was that she had not let go of it in three hours: not when the judge made his little joke about the coffee, not when the bailiff opened the windows, not when Aaron Bosse, at the defense table beside him in a borrowed blue suit, had turned around to look at the gallery and she had flinched.

Across the aisle, the prosecutor, Janice Reiss, finished her questions and sat down. She had asked number seven exactly two things and gotten exactly two yeses. Janice was thirty-three, very quick, and had never lost a felony trial. She was also, in Fajardo's opinion, in too much of a hurry. She had not seen the purse.

"Mr. Fajardo," said Judge Sayre. "Your witnesses. Excuse me. Your panel."

The courtroom laughed politely. Fajardo stood, buttoned his jacket and walked to the rail, not too close.

He started at the other end of the box, with a retired pipe fitter who liked to fish, and worked his way down slowly so that no one would know which of them he wanted. When he got to number seven, he asked her what she did for a living.

"I'm a dental hygienist," she said. Her name was Vicki Martin. She was about forty, in a green sweater.

"So you're used to people who'd rather be anywhere else than where they are."

She smiled at that, a little. Her hands did not move.

"Mrs. Martin, the State asked you whether you could be fair to both sides, and you said yes. I believe you. I'm going to ask you something different, and there's no right answer. Have you, or has anyone close to you, ever been the victim of a crime?"

There was a pause. It was not a long pause. A court reporter would not have marked it. But Fajardo had been asking that question since 1969, and he knew the length of an honest no, and this was not it.

"No," she said.

He let it sit. In the jury box, the pipe fitter shifted in his chair. Janice Reiss looked up from her legal pad.

"Anyone in your family in law enforcement?"

"My brother," said Vicki Martin. "He was with the sheriff's office. He's retired now."

"Did he ever talk to you about his work?"

"Not much." Her knuckles had gone pale on the clasp of the purse. "He didn't like to bring it home."

Fajardo nodded as if that settled it. He thanked her, moved on to number eight, and asked a long friendly question about bowling leagues. He had already decided. He would use one of his strikes on her. It was a shame. She seemed like a decent woman, and she was frightened of something, and he would never know what.

He came back to the defense table and sat down. Aaron Bosse leaned toward him, close enough that Fajardo could smell the jail soap on him.

"Number seven," the boy whispered. "Don't get rid of her."

"Why not?"

Bosse did not look at the jury box. He looked down at his own hands, at the letters on his knuckles.

"Because I know her," he said. "And she knows I didn't do it."

What worked: The purse. Everyone mentioned the purse. Elma said she would never sit in a jury box again without thinking about her hands. Tim said the last two lines made him want to read chapter three immediately, which, he pointed out, is the whole job of the end of a chapter. Nellie liked "the length of an honest no" and asked Noah whether it was true. He said it was. Melinda loved that Fajardo is kind to number seven even while he is deciding to strike her.

What didn't: In the version Noah read, there was a full page between "your panel" and the pipe fitter explaining how peremptory strikes work in Oklahoma, with the statute. It stopped the scene dead. We asked him, gently, to cut it to one sentence. He said "over my dead body." Then, in the parking lot, he said he would think about it. (As you can see, he thought about it.) Two of us also felt Janice Reiss has nothing to do in this chapter but be wrong, and wondered whether she might notice something Fajardo misses, so that the reader isn't sure who to bet on.

Noah's reply, which he has asked me to print: "The statute was very interesting. I stand by the statute. The statute is now in a drawer."