Miranda was gazing in fascination at Rosalyn's hair. Newly tinted a rusty red, it was a work of art, an edifice so delicately, elaborately wrought it took her breath away. How could she possibly be bored with such a hairdo to contemplate?

"You seem to have so much spare time," Rosalyn was saying. "I envy you!" she added, feeling in truth only a soft, snug pity.

"Yes, there are so many new things to see here." Miranda tried to look Rosalyn in the eyes rather than staring at the taut curved wall of hair rising above her ear. "Richard Serra," she added softly. Rosalyn's marvelous hair looked like a Richard Serra sculpture. Even the color.

"No, I don't think he lives here in town. Though, of course, Westport has always been such an artistic place."

When Betty last lived in Westport, there had been a butcher downtown with sawdust on his floor and a cardboard cutout of a pig in his window. There had been a five-and-dime, too. Woolworth's? No, Greenberg's, she remembered now. That was more than forty years ago, yet she felt that if she turned her head quickly enough she might still catch a glimpse of the store's wooden bins filled with buttons and rickrack, of the Buster Brown shoe store next door to it. When she looked at the bank now, she saw the Town Hall it had been. The Starbucks had been the town library, the Y the firehouse. The memories appeared like visions. They laid themselves out like a path to the past. But really they were just a path that led, inevitably, to this moment: Betty Weissmann driving through a town she had long ago deserted, without the man who had deserted her. That's what Betty thought as she parked behind Main Street, facing the river. Her memories all led her here: a parking lot, lucky to get a space.

She got out of the car and locked it. In the days when she had been here with Joseph, she had never had to lock the car. She blamed him for this. It had become her habit to blame him for so many things. That's what you get, Joseph — unfair and extravagant blame. A small price to pay for jettisoning your wife, for chucking her out to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce.

A spurned woman has to look her very best when the spurned woman goes into the city to meet with the man by whom she has been spurned. Not to mention the lawyers who helped him. For this reason, Betty decided to buy a silk sweater at Brooks Brothers and a pair of gold knotted earrings at Tiffany's. Her credit cards were useless, thank you, Joseph, but Annie had added Betty onto her Visa for emergencies, and if this wasn't an emergency, what was? Then Betty bought a suit — ideal for a meeting with lawyers, elegant and dignified — at a large store full of overpriced well-made fashionable clothing. She remembered it as, in decades past, a nondescript men's shop. The store had prospered, and the suit she bought there, extremely expensive, was for those who had prospered along with it. She was not supposed to buy clothes like this anymore. But spurned women, like beggars, could not be choosers. No one could object to this girding of her loins, she thought, anticipating Annie's voice doing exactly that.

Betty took the train in. When the conductor punched holes in her ticket, she found the old-fashioned mechanical click comforting. The train was creaky, the window bleary. The drive into the city was just too much for her these days. Left cataract needed to be taken care of; she would have to get to that. Right now, it was important to get her hair done. She'd left herself plenty of time. Annie said she would have to stop going to Frederic Fekkai, but Annie, in spite of what Annie thought, was not always right.

Her lawyer met her downstairs. He was very solicitous, she noticed. A slight young man with short curly hair of a nondescript mousy brown. He looked like a mouse altogether, his features small and pointed, his little feet in their little shoes. Only his eyes were wrong. They were pale gray, not mouselike at all. How could this young, pale-eyed mouse, his hair so sad and unimportant, possibly do battle with Joseph, who in his efficient businesslike way had very little hair at all?

She sat at the edge of the dark pond that was the conference table. Across the pond sat Joseph. How impatient he must be. He disliked lawyers, he disliked formalities.

"Please sit down, Mrs. Weissmann," said Joseph's lawyer.

Yes, she thought, Mrs. Weissmann. Do you hear that, Mr. Weissmann?

She noticed he was wearing new cuff links. That, more than anything the lawyers said, more even than Joseph's coldness and distance, made her sad. Things were happening to Joseph and they were happening without her. Cuff links, barbells made of yellow gold, were happening to him.

"My client is a generous man," Joseph's lawyer was saying.

"My client is a reasonable woman," her lawyer was saying.

Joseph's eyes met hers, and in the fraction of an instant before they flicked away, she knew they shared the same amused, unhappy thought: Both our lawyers are liars.

7

The months of struggling against the ruin of her business had taken a toll on Miranda. She had phoned and cajoled and browbeaten and pleaded. She had called in every chit. But there was the stink of failure clinging to the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, and neither authors nor editors liked that odor much. No matter what she did or said, she could not seem to keep everything she'd worked so hard to build from washing away like sand beneath her feet.

The appearance on Oprah had been the final humiliation. Miranda was defeated at last, and she was exhausted. So perhaps what happened to her was inevitable, especially while she was living in the same house with her sister and mother, eating her mother's cooking, listening to her sister's indolent scolding. Or was it obligatory for someone about to turn fifty? Maybe it was a simple case of pent-up energy — she was not someone who liked to stand still, even if that meant spinning in circles. Whatever the reason, Miranda found herself embracing a new, a second, a rediscovered adolescence. Because her first adolescence, the stormy drama of which she had rather enjoyed, had been marked by a resolution to, whenever possible, examine her soul, Miranda decided in this new iteration to reexamine her soul. It was possible that this time, at least, she might get results.

Miranda determined that the best place to reexamine her soul was on the beach at dawn. It was unfortunate that Compo Beach was so small, perhaps a half mile from end to end. She found that just as she thought she might be getting somewhere, striding along on her reexamination, she would reach the jetty and have to turn back. Then she would be distracted by the sky, turning from purple darkness to its milky violet morning wash, then bursting into bright pink streaks. Each day the sky was a little different, and therefore that much more distracting. Some days she would see an unlikely flock of green parrots in the parking lot, a convocation so odd and busy and noisy that any examination, or even recognition, of the soul was rendered temporarily impossible. And then, just as she was passing the playground, her feet in the cool sand, the salty air in her lungs, gaining just a little ground on her elusive soul, Miranda's cousin's big Cadillac Escalade would pull up and Cousin Lou would roll down the window and holler hello, frantically waving a pink palm, he was just on his way out and wondering if she would like a lift anywhere.

"No," she would say. "Thanks so much, but I'm just taking a walk." As you see. As we discussed yesterday morning, when you stopped to ask me the same question.

"Walking!" Cousin Lou would exclaim. "Such good exercise." And he and his big black car would purr off into the dawn.

Miranda tried to avoid Cousin Lou as much as possible. It was not that she disliked him. It was not possible to dislike Cousin Lou. He lived to be likable. But he was not introspective, and Miranda was engaged in a course of introspection that required not only her own attempt to examine her soul but an assumption, typical of her, that, therefore, everyone must of course be examining, if not their own souls, then at least hers. Cousin Lou, however, was not interested in her soul any more than he was in his own. As he explained to Miranda, "If Mrs. H. had wanted immigrant children to examine their souls, she would have withheld the funds required for them to do so."

After a week or so of these aborted soul-searching walks, Miranda hit on a new idea. Walking on a suburban beach was insufficiently lonely. There were far too many interruptions. She must go out to sea to be truly contemplative. As she realized this, she was watching a yellow kayak slide across the horizon. That was the answer, of course. In a kayak she could be alone, undisturbed. A sea kayak could take her all along the shore. She could explore the tidal areas at Old Mill, at Burying Hill beach, all along the Gold Coast to Southport, where one of her writers, the radio talk-show host who had been fired two months ago for referring to a female African American Cabinet member as Little Black Bimbo, had once lived.

On Craigslist, Miranda found kayaks for sale from the sailing school at Longshore, Westport's public country club, for $395.

"Is that a bargain?" Betty asked. "I'm sure it must be."

"On the other hand, hand-me-downs never fit well, do they? Perhaps a new one would be safer."

"Shouldn't you rent a boat first?" Annie asked. "Take lessons? You've never been in a kayak in your life."

"I thought you wanted to save money! Lessons are expensive."

"Lessons! It's not as if your sister's training for the Olympics, Annie."

But Betty could see Annie was upset, and at the first opportunity she took her aside and placed her hand firmly on Annie's arm, as she had always done when the girls squabbled as children.

"Miranda needs to search her soul," Betty then gently explained. "Now, sweetheart, how is she supposed to do that without a nice new kayak?"

What Betty didn't explain was that she would have paid almost any sum of money, whether she had it or not, to get Miranda out of the cramped bungalow for at least part of the day. It was true that she was happy to spend time with Miranda. It had been a lifetime, it seemed, since she had been able to say good morning to her daughters and to say good night, too. And Miranda was good company. It was a miracle at this age to have her talented, interesting, grown-up daughter there, every day, in the house, to share a pot of coffee, a salad for lunch, a pot of tea in the afternoon. On the other hand, Betty had noticed that it was invariably she who made the coffee, the salad, and the tea. Miranda, once so capable and busy in her life in New York, still so energetic about her soulful walks, was limp and helpless around the house.

Betty would never let her daughter see her concern. Miranda needed her to be strong. But her heart went out to Miranda, and she lay awake at night wondering what would become of her pretty, vivacious, irresponsible daughter, so alone in the world, no husband, no children. And now, no authors either.

She knew Miranda was broke or, as Miranda preferred to put it, "temporarily unable to access funds," which must be terribly frustrating considering all her success. There was an awful, endless, complicated lawsuit that had frozen all of Miranda's assets. As if they were so many lamb chops, Betty thought, imagining the assets wrapped in aluminum foil and coated with a white film of ice.

Poor Miranda had never been very good with money. Joseph had always been telling her to save more. But Miranda would just laugh and say that money was not the goal, it was the means, then set off on another eco trip, spending tens of thousands of dollars to go someplace whose claim to fame was that it had gray shower water and you had to put your toilet paper in the wastebasket... Oh, it was all incomprehensible. If Joseph had been alive, he would have explained it to her, but since Joseph had died so tragically, Betty was left in ignorance to watch with a broken heart as her daughter worried about money. Miranda had never worried about it before, and now that it was all gone, it seemed doubly unfair to have to worry about something she no longer had.

A kayak might be just the thing to cheer her up. At the very least, it would get her out of the house, leaving Betty a moment to search her own soul without having to jump up to make her forty-nine-year-old daughter tuna fish sandwiches "just the way I like them, Mom!"