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I don’t look at my phone. As a matter of fact, I tuck it deep into my purse, buzzing be damned.

Five things.

This shouldn’t be difficult. I want things constantly. I have an entire cart on three different online stores devoted to things I want, although most of those have been sitting there long enough that I clearly don’t want them very much.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Right now?”

“Sure,” I say as I follow her to the next stall.

My sister doesn’t even slow down. “One of those.”

I follow her finger toward a table displaying handmade ceramics. There are mugs, bowls, little dishes shaped like leaves and, at the very end, several lamps with bases painted to look like mushrooms.

I wait for more, but Rose keeps walking.

“Why?”

She looks over her shoulder. “Why what?”

“Why do you want it?”

“Because I do.”

“But where would you put it?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, does it? Just because I want it doesn’t mean I am buying it.”

That stops me.

Rose turns around and continues walking, and I stand there for another second before following her.

“You can want something and not buy it?”

She looks at me again. “Okay, now you’re fucking with me.”

“I know that conceptually,” I say, because obviously I understand that wanting something and acquiring it are two separate events. I have wanted a house in Tuscany since I was twenty-two and have so far managed not to accidentally purchase one. “I mean for the assignment. What’s the point of identifying something I want if I’m not going to do anything about it?”

Rose’s expression changes slightly, the amusement fading as she considers me, and I recognize the moment she realizes I’m asking an actual question instead of continuing our argument about an eighty-five-dollar mushroom lamp.

“Maybe there isn’t a point.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. You saw something, you liked it, you wanted it. Then you kept walking.”

She says this as though it’s the most obvious sequence of events in the world, then turns toward the next row of stalls while I remain where I am for another minute, looking back at the ceramic booth.

The mushroom lamp is actually adorable. It’s also enormous, overpriced, and would look ridiculous in my house unless I put it in the little reading nook upstairs, where the warm light would actually⁠—

No. Immediately no.

I catch up with Rose. “You do realize this philosophy of yours is how you ended up living in a commune.”

“It wasn’t a commune.”

“There were, like, eleven of you living from the land.”