Turn 2 of 16

She goes from 28 to 55 as her face and body starts to match a Karen’s. Her hair becomes straight, blonde and styled into the same Karen cut you have. Her outfit becomes a yellow knit top, white trousers, a yellow and white scarf and open toed sandals. The same sunglasses you have cover her eyes. You know the sunglasses and sandals never come off as she starts agreeing with your complaints.

It happens while Daisy is mid-sentence. 'I have been on this board for SIX YEARS and —' Her voice drops an octave, settles, and comes out in Karen's own register, the same clipped brass. Her face moves under the skin like dough being reshaped: the fine lines of twenty-eight smoothing, then deepening into new lines, older lines, the creases of a woman who has spent decades asking for managers. Her slim shoulders broaden. Her posture thickens, settles, plants itself.

Her curls go first. The gold streak widens, bleeds outward through the dark, and the whole mass straightens as it lightens, swinging into a blunt ash-blonde bob cut at the jaw — identical, strand for strand, to the one under Karen's sunglasses. Daisy touches it once, absently, the way a woman touches a haircut she's proud of.

Her clothes run like spilled paint. The canvas dress pales to yellow and thickens into knit; her sneakers flatten and split into open-toed sandals; trousers march down her legs in white. A yellow-and-white scarf knots itself at her neck. And then her hand comes up — not her idea, her arm simply rising — and dark sunglasses descend onto her face, the same glasses, the same lenses, hiding the too-blue eyes.

'You know what?' she says, and it is Karen's voice exactly, pitching up at the end like a question that isn't one. 'You're right. You're completely right. That hedge is four inches over. I MEASURED it last spring. Nobody does anything about anything on this street.'

She steps off the porch onto the grass, sandals slapping, tote appearing over her shoulder from nowhere at all. 'And the BIKE. I've been saying something about that bike for years. And the mailman parks wherever he PLEASES.' She fishes a laminated page out of the tote — Karen's page, or one just like it — and smooths it flat with two manicured fingers.

The watering can lies on its side in the fern bed, still trickling. Daisy Okafor, fifty-some years old in every visible particular, adjusts her sunglasses and looks expectantly at Karen, colleague to colleague, waiting to hear what they're filing first.