Sitting at the table trying to make a budget, Annie said, "There's very little coming in and there's way too much going out."

The other two nodded, then continued to read the newspaper.

When Annie said it again, louder, Miranda patiently explained that writing down all their debts did not miraculously supply the family with more money. The point of a budget was not to miraculously conjure up more money, Annie answered. The point was to figure out realistically how much they could afford to spend. Betty said she thought it would be far more practical to have more money, miraculously or otherwise, and Annie gave up, sitting with her pencil and her calculations in lonely, resentful silence.

That night, as every night, the bills rose up in her memory and haunted her. She turned in her bed, twisted in the sheets. The thin moonlight came in through her window. It was cold and white, like a marble tomb. She was hot and flushed and alive with worry.

Her anger and frustration with her mother and sister, however, were just bits of sand caught in the wind of her true rage. That was saved for Josie and, now, Felicity as well. Annie still could not believe that the person behind all their suffering was Frederick Barrow's sister.

"And to think Rosalyn invited that treacherous family to Rosh Hashanah," she said one evening as they sat glumly before the faux fire. "Maybe that's why Frederick was so weird."

"You said he wasn't weird," Miranda muttered.

"Well, he was."

"Listen," Betty said abruptly, "I'll just have to get a job."

"What are you going to do, Mom? Greet people at Walmart?"

Betty leaned toward her, suddenly animated. "Is Walmart as nice as Costco?"

It was therefore with great relief that the three women accepted an invitation to visit Lou and Rosalyn in Palm Springs.

"It's our fiftieth wedding anniversary," Rosalyn said when she called. "Can you believe it?"

Betty congratulated her coldly.

"Against all the odds," Rosalyn said.

"And how is your father?" Betty asked to parry the indelicacy. "How is Mr. Shpuntov?"

"The desert agrees with him."

Betty imagined a towering dune nodding polite assent to Mr. Shpuntov.

"Well," she said more cheerfully, "that's something, then."

"Now, Betty," Rosalyn said in a pedagogical tone that got Betty's back up whenever she heard it. It was Rosalyn's docent voice. "Now, Betty, listen, and don't be stubborn. Lou and I both miss you and the girls."

Betty walked out to the sunporch. There was no sun, just weak, struggling light. The sky was overcast and dull. It had rained the night before and the trees were still dark with wet. She was cold on the unheated sunporch. There was nothing to do there, nothing to see, nothing even to hear, no birds or passing children. She stood suspended in a winter void, only the damp cold and the musty smell of old carpet penetrating the deprivation.

"We miss you, too," she said. And perhaps the girls did miss Lou and Rosalyn now and then, she really didn't know. As for herself, she missed only one person.

"We want you all to come out here for Christmas. Our treat, of course. My father was saying the other day that in all his years he had never seen people who were so generous to their friends, but you know us, Betty — that's just the way we are. And I don't want you to start giving me excuses about why you can't come. A trip will do you good, Betty. Lou and I are worried about you. Even my father mentioned it to me just the other day. Sitting there in that hut, of course you get what you pay for, no disrespect to the landlords. Ha! I make myself laugh. But there you are. No one to talk to. Except your daughters, of course. How lucky you are to have daughters. Still, I manage very well, don't I, even without children? Lou and his Like Family. I have to laugh." And she did.

Betty, who had not been listening but had heard the words lucky and daughters, said, "Oh yes," in an absent voice.

"Now, don't you Oh Yes me, Betty Weissmann. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking we're just making this generous offer because we feel sorry for you, and I can understand that, I really can, but you have to believe me, it's mostly because we love you and want what's best."

Betty moved back to her desk, but she did not look at the mound of papers and bright folders piled high upon it. She was staring at the television set. There, on the soap opera she favored because it was set in a seaside town not unlike Westport, if Westport were inhabited by spies, terrorists, gangsters, and swinging wife-swapping millionaires, which who was to say it wasn't, there on the screen, in the soap opera's popular new art gallery hangout, stood a handsome dark-haired young man facing another handsome blond young man. There was tension, visible tension between them. And tenderness. And longing. Betty had seen that expression before. She had seen Kit Maybank look at Miranda like that. Only now Kit Maybank was on television in an art gallery standing before a reproduction — she supposed it had to be a reproduction — of a Keith Haring (her friends Arnie and Maureen bought one years ago, she hadn't understood it at the time, but it certainly had appreciated) and his, Kit Maybank's, hand shot out and grasped the hand of the other handsome young man, the one with blond hair, and Kit Maybank stepped forward and the other young man stepped forward and Kit Maybank was in the other young man's arms and the other young man was in Kit Maybank's arms and with the Keith Haring reproduction as a backdrop they were kissing, passionately, with their mouths gaping, as people always seemed to kiss on soap operas.

"Oh my God," she heard Miranda gasp from the doorway behind her.

"Betty?" Rosalyn was saying into the phone. "Betty, are you there?"

"I can't believe it!" Miranda said.

"Now, Miranda, it's just a role," Betty said.

"Betty?" Rosalyn said again.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Rosalyn. Miranda's young man just kissed another young man on television."

"What young man? Kit? Kit's gay?"

"Just on TV."

Miranda, moving closer to the TV, said, "Kit's in Los Angeles!"

"Los Angeles?" Rosalyn said, overhearing Miranda. "I hope he got his marriage in before they changed the law."

"Kit's married?" Betty asked.

"Kit's married?" Miranda said. She grabbed the phone from her mother. "Kit's married?" she asked Rosalyn.

"He is? Well, you live long enough, you see everything."

On the plane ride to Los Angeles, Miranda gazed impatiently out the window. Although all of them were thrilled to be liberated from what Miranda called cottage arrest, it had still not been easy for her to convince the other inmates to make the trip. It was a challenge, but Miranda had always liked a challenge in the good old days before her life had collapsed, and this one had energized her. It was a pleasure to have a goal again, to work her mother and sister the way she used to work publishers and editors. She snapped back into that alert, predatory sentience of her occupation not with pleasure so much as exasperated fondness — this was something she knew, an old fawning pal. She had been forced to campaign using both subtlety and aggression, sweetness and sour-tempered sarcasm. Of course, she had prevailed. She could not recall a time when she had not prevailed within her family. Betty had hesitated, not relishing the role of beggarly relative in two different geographical locations. But she had caved fairly quickly. The holdout, as usual, was Annie.

"They're paying for it, so you can't use that as an excuse," Miranda said. "The library is giving all of you a forced two-week unpaid vacation, so you can't use that."

"Go by yourself," Annie had said. "If you want to go so badly."

Only when Annie found out that neither Charlie nor Nick could make it to Connecticut for Christmas did she give in.

"I'm sorry we won't get to see them," Miranda said to Annie.

But she wasn't sorry. She was exhilarated. The nose of the plane was pointed toward the West Coast. Somewhere on that coast were Kit Maybank and Henry Maybank. Somewhere between Los Angeles, where Kit now lived, and Palm Springs, where he spent his weekends in a rented house he shared with a friend. She had read all about him on a soap opera fan blog. Kit's disappearance made sense to her now, his silence. He was not on a little independent movie at all. He was a soap opera regular. No wonder he had been so uncommunicative, so distant. He who had dreamed of Shakespeare was now playing Zink Lattimore, gay graffiti artist. Poor Kit was mortified, that was all. That was why she hadn't heard from him. He had hoped to slink away into daytime TV obscurity, leaving her with her exalted vision of him, with her memories intact.

"Funny about memories," she said to Annie, who had, as usual, volunteered to sit in the middle seat.

"Useless author trivia," Annie said. "That's the kind of memory I have: today is Rex Stout's birthday. For example."

"What street did his detective live on? It seemed an odd address even at the time," said Betty.

"Thirty-fourth Street. 918 West Thirty-fourth Street, sometimes 922, 904. Once it was 918 East Thirty-fourth Street. It was always the same brownstone, though."

"You were always like that, even as a child," Betty said, patting her arm proudly.

"Memories," Miranda said irritably. "Not memory."

"Memories are like fish," Betty said. "Isn't that the expression? After three days they stink."

A layer of white clouds lay beneath them, occasional openings affording quick glimpses of the United States with its crop circles and ribbons of rivers and faded, flat winter landscape. Annie looked past her sleeping sister at the greasy window and the blue sky beyond. That she had agreed to follow Lou, Rosalyn, and Mr. Shpuntov to Palm Springs was still sinking in. But there had been no resisting Miranda. Miranda was more animated than she had been since Kit Maybank left Westport. Annie assumed Miranda and Kit had been in touch. Were they getting back together in some way? She wondered if that was a good thing. Her sister smiled dreamily as she slept, forehead on the window, white billowing clouds beyond. Yes, it would be good. If it made Miranda happy, it would be good. As for Betty, although she hated to fly, although her relationship with Rosalyn could charitably be called prickly, although she loved having Christmas in her own house, once she had given in to Miranda, she had taken up the cause like a true convert. Christmas in the desert! Palm Springs! So mid-century! So Rat Pack!

"J. Smeaton Chase lived in Palm Springs," Annie had offered. "He wrote a book about it."

"Celebrities, etc.?" Betty asked.

"No. More like cactuses, etc."

When they arrived at the airport, they picked up their rental car. It was the only expense they would have for their entire two-week stay. Cousin Lou had insisted on paying for the plane tickets. They had refused until Rosalyn explained that he would use frequent-flier miles that were about to run out.

"Don't be proud," she said. "It is no longer appropriate."

Betty was too proud to respond.

Now she drove along the windy highway, the little Ford Focus shaking from side to side. Her daughters had each offered to take the wheel, saying what a long flight it had been, how tired she must be. Meaning, of course, how old she was. It was an ugly road, but the sky was vast and blue, the malls gradually gave way to cactus, and the snowy mountains crept closer and closer. Betty tried to enjoy the view as the car shuddered through a forest of tall white windmills.

"Wow," Miranda said. "Try tilting at those."

They pulled up into the driveway of a one-story house among other one-story houses. Its roof was shaped like a nun's hat, wings swooping up on either side. Standing at the front door were two men: Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov, and Roberts, the semiretiree.

Annie rolled down her window and called out a hello.

"Huh," Miranda said. "Codger talk, poor old souls."

"Your soul certainly isn't old," Annie said. "Infantile perhaps, but not old." While my soul is quite thoroughly middle-aged, she thought.

"There is no soul," Betty said suddenly, with unexpected force. "Everyone knows that."

Roberts and Mr. Shpuntov had indeed been indulging in codger talk. Mr. Shpuntov found it warm for December in the Bronx, while Roberts agreed that the dry, bright winter heat was not usual for the Bronx at this time of year and left it at that. Then the old man lurched toward the door and began violently ringing the bell. When his daughter answered, he barked out a cross "Who's there? What do you want here? Go away," then slammed the door in her face, muttering something uncomplimentary about Jehovah's Witnesses.