She would sell the house and be free to do with her life as she pleased.

She might move to Italy, like that girl who wrote Under the Tuscan Sun.

But that was possible only if the house was worth something. Bank-ruptcy was not part of the bargain, and there were moments now, terrible moments, when she wondered if she wouldn’t be better off without Cem. It had crossed her mind that if she did leave, she could move to New York and live with Lola in that sweet little apartment on Eleventh Street.

But there wasn’t even enough money for that. They could no longer afford the apartment, and somehow, Lola had to be told this as well.

Beetelle was startled by the sudden presence of Lola in the room. “I’ve been thinking things over, Mother,” she said, seating herself carefully on the edge of the bed. A quick survey of the house had revealed that things were worse than she’d thought — in the refrigerator was supermarket cheese instead of gourmet; the wireless Internet service had been canceled and their cable plan reduced to basic. “I don’t have to work for Philip. I could get a real job, I suppose. Maybe do something in fashion. Or I could take acting classes. Philip knows everyone — he’ll know the best teacher.

And I’m sure I could do it. I watched Schiffer Diamond, and it didn’t look hard at all. Or I could try out for a reality show. Philip says they’re shooting more and more reality in New York. And doing a reality show doesn’t take any talent at all.”

“Lola, darling,” Beetelle said, overcome by her daughter’s desire to help out, “that would all be wonderful. If only we could afford to keep you in New York.”

Lola’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Beetelle shook her head. “We can’t afford the apartment anymore. I’ve been dreading telling you this, but we’ve already told the management company. They’re going to let us out of the lease at the end of January.”

Lola gasped. “You got rid of my apartment behind my back?”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” Beetelle said.

“How could you do such a thing?” Lola demanded.

“Darling, please. I didn’t have a choice. As it is, both Mercedes are going to be repossessed in January ...”

“How could you let this happen, Mother?”

“I don’t know,” Beetelle wailed. “I trusted your father. And this is what he does to us. And now we’ll all have to live in a condo someplace —

where no one knows us — and I guess we’ll try to start over ...”

Lola gave a harsh laugh. “You expect me to live in a condo? With you and Daddy? No, Mother,” she said firmly. “I can’t do that. I won’t leave New York. Not when I’ve made so much progress. Our only hope is for me to stay in New York.”

“But where will you live?” Beetelle cried. “You can’t survive on the streets.”

“I’ll live with Philip,” Lola said. “I practically live with him anyway.”

“Oh, Lola,” Beetelle said. “Living with a man? Before you’re married?

What will people think?”

“We don’t have any choice, Mother. And when Philip and I get married, no one will remember that we lived together. And Philip has loads of money now. He just got paid a million dollars to write a screenplay.

And once we’re married” — Lola looked over at her mother — “we’ll figure something out. He probably would have asked me to marry him by now if it weren’t for his aunt. She’s always around, checking up on him.

Thank God she’s old. Maybe she’ll get cancer or something and have to give up her apartment. Then you and Daddy could move in.”

“Oh, darling,” Beetelle said, and tried to hug her. Lola moved away.

If her mother touched her, Lola knew she would fall apart herself and start crying. Now was not the time to be weak. And seeming to channel some of her mother’s former legendary strength in the face of adversity, she stood up.

“Come on, Mother,” she said. “Let’s go to the mall. We may not have money, but that doesn’t mean I can let myself go. You must have some credit left on your MasterCard.”

12

Billy Litchfield was on the train to Springfield, Massachusetts, when he got the call from his sister informing him that their mother had fallen down and broken her hip and was in the hospital. She’d been carrying groceries when she slipped on a patch of ice. She would live, but her pelvis was shattered. The surgeons would put the pelvis back together with metal plates, but it would take a long time to heal, and she could be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was only eighty-three; she might easily live for another ten or fifteen years. “I don’t have time to take care of her,” Billy’s sister, Laura, wailed on the phone. Laura was a corporate lawyer and single mom, twice divorced with two children, eighteen and twelve. “And I can’t afford to put her in a nursing home. Jacob’s going to college next year. It’s too much.”

“It’ll be fine,” Billy said. He was taking the news more calmly than he would have expected.

“How can it be fine?” his sister said. “Once something like this happens, it’s downhill all the way.”

“She must have some money,” Billy said.

“Why would she have money?” his sister said. “Not everyone is like your rich friends in New York.”

“I’m aware of how other people live,” Billy said.

“You’re going to have to move back to Streatham and take care of her,”

his sister said warningly. “She was grocery shopping for you. She normally only shops on Thursday mornings,” she added accusingly, as if the accident had been his fault. “She made a special trip for you.”

“Thanks, dear,” Billy said.

He hung up and looked out the window. The train was pulling in to New Haven, where the landscape was depressing and familiarly bleak.

Going home made him sad and uncomfortable; he’d had neither a happy childhood nor a happy home. His father, an orthodontist who believed homosexuality was a disease and that women were second-class citizens, was despised by both Billy and his sister. When his father passed away fifteen years ago, they said it was a blessing. Nevertheless, Laura had always resented Billy, his mother’s favorite. Billy knew Laura thought him frivolous and couldn’t forgive their mother for allowing Billy to study useless pursuits in college, like art and music and philosophy. Billy, on the other hand, thought his sister a dreary bore. She was absolutely ordinary; he couldn’t comprehend how nature could have supplied him with such a dull sibling. She was a drone — the very epitome of everything Billy feared a human life could become. She had no passions, either in her life or for her life, and therefore tended to exaggerate every tiny event out of proportion. Billy guessed his sister was making a bigger deal out of his mother’s fall than was necessary.

But when he got to the hospital on the outskirts of Springfield, he found his mother was worse than he’d hoped. She was always robust, but the accident had turned her into a colorless old lady under white hospital bedding, although she’d colored and permed her hair in preparation for his Christmas visit. “Ah, Billy.” She sighed. “You came.”

“Of course I came, Mother. What made you think I wouldn’t?”

“She’s on morphine,” the nurse said. “She’s going to be confused for a few days, aren’t you, dear?”

His mother began to cry. “I don’t want to be a burden to you and your sister. Maybe they should put me to sleep.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Billy said. “You’re going to be fine.”

When visiting hours were over, the doctor pulled him aside. The operation had gone fine, but they wouldn’t know when or if his mother would be able to walk. In the meantime, she’d have to be in the wheelchair. Billy nodded and picked up his Gaultier bag, thinking how incongruous the expensive French luggage looked in this sad local hospital, then waited outside in the cold for thirty minutes for a taxi that took him the twenty miles to his mother’s house. The taxi cost a hundred and thirty dollars, and Billy winced at the price. With his mother injured, he would need to start saving money. In the snow next to the driveway, he saw the imprint of his mother’s body where she had fallen.

The back door was unlocked, and entering the kitchen, Billy found two bags of groceries on the counter, obviously placed there by a kind para-medic. Although he’d always considered himself a cynic, recently Billy had noticed that random acts of human kindness now caused him to become sentimental. Feeling heavy of heart, he began unpacking the groceries. In one bag was a warm container of light cream. This was what would have caused his mother’s unfortunate trip to the store. Billy still insisted on using light cream in his coffee.

He arrived at the hospital the next morning at nine. His sister came shortly thereafter, accompanied by her younger child, Dominique, a scrawny girl with thin blond hair and a nose like a beak; she looked just like her father, a local carpenter who had grown marijuana in the summers and eventually gotten arrested.

Billy tried to talk to the girl, but she was either not interested or not educated. She admitted that she hated reading books and hadn’t read Harry Potter. What did she do, then? Billy asked. She talked to her friends on the Internet. Billy raised his eyebrows at his sister, but she shrugged.

“I can’t keep her off it. No one can keep their kids off it, and frankly, no one has time to monitor their kids every minute. Especially me.”

Billy had some feeling for the girl — after all, she was a blood relative —

but was saddened by her as well. The little girl was on the border of becoming white trash, he decided, and he was struck by the irony of how hard his own parents had worked to be upper-middle-class, to make sure their children were educated, to expose them to culture (his father had played Beethoven in his office), only to produce a granddaughter who would not even read. The Dark Ages, Billy thought, were just around the corner.

He spent a long day with his mother. She was in a cast from her knee to her waist. He held her hand. “Billy,” she said. “What’s going to happen to me?” “You’re going to be fine, Ma, you’ll see.” “What if I can’t drive?”

“We’ll figure it out.” “What if I have to go into a nursing home? I don’t want to go to a nursing home. I’ll die there.” “I won’t let it happen, Ma.”

His stomach churned with fear. If it came to that, how could he prevent it? He had no means to do otherwise.

His sister asked him to dinner at her house — nothing fancy, macaroni and cheese. Laura lived a short distance away from their mother in a large ranch house that their father had bought her after her first divorce. It was a mystery to the family why Laura, who was a lawyer, could never manage to make ends meet, but since she was a writer of legal briefs, Billy suspected she didn’t make as much money as her law degree would imply.

And she was a spender. Her house had wall-to-wall carpeting, a dinette set, display cases of porcelain figurines, a collection of teddy bears, four TVs, and in the living room, a modular sofa in which each piece had cupholders and retractable footrests. The thought of spending the evening in such an environment filled Billy with dread — he knew it would leave him unbearably depressed — and so he invited Laura and her daughter to their mother’s house instead.

He made an herb-roasted chicken, roasted potatoes with rosemary, hari-cots verts, and an arugula salad. He had learned to cook from the private chefs of his wealthy friends, for he always made it a point to mix with the staff in the kitchen. His niece, Dominique, was fascinated — apparently, she’d never seen anyone cook before. Studying the girl, Billy decided she might have potential. Her eyes were wide-set, and she had a pretty smile, although her incisors were as pointy as a dog’s. “What will Dominique do when she grows up?” he asked his sister when they were in the kitchen, cleaning up after the meal.

“How should I know? She’s twelve,” Laura said.

“Does she have any interests? Special talents?”

“Besides pissing me off? She says she wants to be a vet when she grows up. I said the same thing when I was twelve. It’s something all little girls say.”

“Do you wish you were a vet now?” Billy asked.

“I wish I was married to Donald Trump and lived in Palm Beach,”

Laura said. She smacked herself on the forehead. “I knew I forgot something. I should have married a rich guy.”