December 7, 2020:
Her sister on the coast road.
She points to me and laughs, whispering in her older colleague's ear. And her older colleague laughs too, demonstrating how age brings neither wisdom nor compassion.
In this she's just like her mother, although behind her back her mother disavows her, repeatedly, as "my biggest failure". Where that was her mother whispering in ears, mine and my then-fiancée's, demonstrating the instinct for hurtful backbiting her youngest daughter eventually learned by emulating her.
She wasn't there. My erstwhile then-fiancée. She was in Europe with her new husband. I was in Salinas with my mother's dead cat, dead since the sleepless night before when I'd put her down to end her starving to death. My best friend, ever, that little cat. She was dead, I was bereft, I went for a walk, it was my bad fortune to encounter her sister, their mother's greatest failure, who laughed at me there in my moment of greatest sorrow.
Usually people aren't evil so much as small.