I LOVED HELPING my sister Betsy hide her bad hand in the morning. By eight, she'd be standing on the side of the bathtub, looking at her body in the bathroom mirror. Okay, she'd say. She would fling out her bad hand: Make it fashionable. I'd flip through my tube tops, finding one the same color as her swimsuit. Betsy examined her tan lines or put on Sea Coral lipstick because she thought that was right for the beach. She ignored me when I pulled her bad hand?the one with no fingers ? toward me and put a tube top over it. She liked tube tops because they hid her hand completely but made her look like she was carrying something bright. Maybe tape it shut, I said. Or paper clip it. And bunch it at your wrist. There. Betsy would hold the tube top up and examine it. Cool, she said. I smiled, the expert. I wanted the tube top to look natu ral. I wanted to slip the tube top over her and see a good hand push through. My parents were the ones who started helping Betsy hide her bad hand. After my mother hemmed the bottom of Betsy's coats, she would sew the extra material to one sleeve. Betsy always had sleeves that were too long for her; I thought all her coats looked like they were coming alive and tak ing over her body. My mother took forever with those sleeves. I hated watching her with Betsy. Because of her hand, Betsy possessed my parents in a way that I didn't. Sometimes when I played with Betsy, I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands; but the sight of me with gigantic sleeves always seemed to annoy my mother. You don't want to look like a waif, she said, and rolled up my coat sleeves all the way to the elbow. Helping Betsy with her hand was the only thing I could do right that summer. Betsy was only eleven, a year younger than me, but had become pretty. The sun went into her skin and she held it easy, her hair, knees, glowing. Everyone knew her walk at our junior high school, a slow, wat ery step, her hair lifting and slapping her shoulders. Betsy understood something that I didn't, and as her older sister it was my job to stop this. That was the summer when my father moved from his bed to the couch every morning and when my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with him. My father was tired. He woke up at night, cold, when it was warm outside. He had a little cough. All over the house I could hear him;