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“What’ll ya have?” the waitress asks. The three junior Albas all want blueberry pancakes. I order eggs and bacon with coffee.

“We want coffee, too,” says an Alba.

“Nope, orange juice for you,” I say. The waitress says, “Next they’ll be wanting to smoke,” and takes the order back to the kitchen.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” says an Alba.

“Be discreet,” I warn her. My younger selves will take turns passing by my parents’ booth and staring not-too-subtly at them. To Mama and Dad it will look as though one girl is hovering near them—though the Albas are wearing three distinctly different outfits, they all look like the same very young and clean homeless person. I’m sitting with my back to my parents. My younger selves sit opposite me, wedged together, sardine-style. They don’t bother looking at me, though; their eyes are all fixed over my shoulders. One of them makes a traffic cop hand gesture, move along, move along, and I oblige and scooch to the far end of my seat so they can stare unimpeded.

Why do I keep revisiting this morning? Perhaps because I can; I know the time and the place because my parents have both mentioned it; they used to bring me here when I was tiny, out of nostalgia. But also because it is before: this morning everything is new, like a garden after rain. My mother is relieved: at last her secret life has caught up with her real life and merged—she has found her time traveler in the present at last, at last. My father is stunned, delighted, confused: he understands that everything has changed, but he doesn’t yet appreciate how complete the change will be. When I was twelve I liked sitting here with them, knowing so many things they didn’t yet know about each other, knowing they had no idea that their future daughter is here with them, exulting in their beginnings.

My parents order breakfast: two eggs sunny-side up with toast for my mother, pancakes and bacon for my dad. Alba comes back from the toilet, and the other two Albas scoot out of the booth and let her sit down, then all three are sitting across from me again but in a different order. I think about the phrase get your ducks in a row. There’s a subtle commotion under the table. The first Alba is taking off her shoes so that the second Alba can wear them. Shoes are always the most difficult clothing to steal, and my three selves only have two pairs between them.

My younger selves all have the same breakfast to avoid confusing the waitress. She brings my coffee and three glasses of juice. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a plastic straw, and I unsheathe one of them from its paper covering and marvel at this weightless little tube of white, red and yellow. How many thousands of these things have I used without a thought? One day they were gone, though I didn’t notice at the time. One Alba notices me noticing this one, so I hand it back to her. She tilts her head, wondering if I mean anything by my attention to the straw, so I smile and take a test sip of the burnt coffee. There’s no upside to discussing the evils of plastic with my barely pubescent selves on such a nice sunny morning.

I close my eyes and listen. Meat hisses on the grill, the coffee machine sputters, the cook and the waitress trade insults and gossip in languid voices as though it’s obligatory. In the booth between me and my parents, two men are talking about someone named Josh. They both seem to be angry with him. As I eavesdrop, I realize that Josh must have been the lover of the man sitting nearer to me and that Josh is dead. The men fall silent, pay their bill and leave. They are both dressed in dark suits and I wonder if they are on their way to Josh’s funeral. No: today is Sunday, no funerals. Or is that just a thing in Christianity? I make a mental note to google it when I get home, though I’ll never know who these men are or where they are going; that hanging uncertainty is often my penalty for spying. If Zach were here we’d invent a history for Josh and his angry lover and friend, and we would give them an ending, though not necessarily closure.

Breakfast arrives. My young selves spread generous amounts of butter on their enormous double-stacked blueberry pancakes and pass the maple syrup back and forth without speaking. We must look strange to anyone observing us: triplets and their mother eating together in silence with frequent eye contact and hand gestures. Now that the men are gone I can hear my parents’ conversation.

“. . . I’m not sure,” Mama says. “It’s hard to explain. I tend to reject a ton of art theory; I mean, in school we have to read certain people but I’d much rather go to museums and look. I don’t want to have to write a manifesto every time I make a sculpture. And I don’t want people to feel stupid when they see my art. I want them to stop thinking and just let the art inside them, like an emotion. They can think afterward.”

“Do you want them to feel any particular emotion?” Dad asks.

“I know what I feel when I make a thing. Maybe that comes through.” There is a long pause, and then she adds, “Longing. Loss. Beauty.”

“Is beauty an emotion?”

“It must be,” Mama says. “Don’t you think so?”

“Yes. Maybe. When you said that it made me think of color, how every color seems to be a different feeling.” The waitress asks if they want refills on their coffee and Dad says, “Thanks.”

Now the waitress is at our booth topping up my coffee. As soon as she’s gone, the Alba closest to the end of the banquette slides off to take her turn spying on her way to the washroom. The Alba who’s already had a look says to me, “How old are you?”

“Forty-nine.” I know where this is going.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.” I almost never lie to my younger self; it would only wreak havoc. I hold up my hand to indicate that I’m not going to elaborate and that I want to keep eavesdropping.

She asks anyway. “How did you meet your husband?” The other Alba shushes her.

“That’s complicated,” I tell her. “Ask me another time.”

The two Albas exchange a look. The second one says, “A party, a taxi line and a piano competition.” I hate it when they gang up on me.

“How could you meet the same guy three times?” the first one asks. They both look at me expectantly, but I shake my head.

The second Alba says, “You could meet him, and he could meet you, but then you’ve both met each other. Like Dad and Mama. So how can you meet someone for the first time three times?”

The other Alba says, “Are you divorced?”

“No,” I say.

“So how come—”

“‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’” I reply. “Hush now and eat your pancakes.”

They make identical grumpy faces and resume eating. I filch a forkful of pancake from the missing Alba’s plate. It’s doughy, lukewarm and syrup-saturated, with one hot blueberry that pops on my tongue.