Miranda was the one who found her and called 911. She and Leanne had not sailed that day. First they had called Kit using Skype and watched Henry chat with his father. Miranda had worried a little over how she would respond to seeing Kit again, even if it was only through a video chat on a computer. Leanne told him she was there, and he looked a little taken aback, then recovered and said in his typically jaunty way, "A conspiracy. Don't believe everything you hear."

Miranda thought, No, I guess not, but she said nothing, stood out of range of the camera, and watched.

He was just as good-looking as ever, she thought, though his manner, so easy and free, now struck her as fraught with new meaning — it was as if Henry were his nephew or younger brother, a little kid he liked, for whom, however, he had little or no responsibility.

"I was scared," Henry said about seeing a bloody Kit held at gunpoint on TV.

"It was catsup," Kit said. "Isn't that funny? Catsup all over Daddy's face?"

Henry thought that was funny. Then: "Come home," he said.

"Okay, buddy," said Kit. "I will! As soon as I can."

Leanne, standing behind Henry, gave Miranda a significant look.

"I saw that," Kit said. "Listen, I'm working, okay? That's what you were always on me about, so now I'm working, okay?"

"Okay," Leanne said. "Fair enough. Sorry."

Kit sulked for a moment. Was he really thirty-five? Miranda wondered. She looked at Leanne. How old was Leanne? It had never occurred to her to ask or even to wonder.

"As a matter of fact, I have to leave for work right now, okay? It's like an hour drive to the studio..."

Henry threw his father a kiss, and the screen went black.

"How old are you?" Miranda asked suddenly.

"Thirty-eight," Leanne said. "Why?"

"Eight," Henry said, holding up all his fingers.

"I'm forty-nine," Miranda said.

Leanne tilted her head thoughtfully, then said, "So that's all right, then."

She lifted Henry up, gave him a twirl, and said they should go on an adventure, a bike adventure to Devil's Den.

They pedaled along the winding, hilly roads that led to the nature preserve in Weston. Henry was strapped in his seat behind Leanne. Rushing down a hill, Miranda passed the other two, stood on the pedals as she had as a child, and coasted. Speed, she thought, is the glory of going forward.

"Bankruptcy definitely agrees with you," Leanne said, laughing, when they reached the bottom of the hill.

The papers from the lawyers had arrived the day before. "Belly up," said Miranda. "That's me."

Henry looked curiously at her belly.

"I'm free," Miranda said.

They followed the steep path to a leafy spot closely sheltered by tall skinny birch trees. Miranda put her hand on the white trunk of one of them. "The most beautiful tree." She felt a surge of emotion, this same surge she felt so often now. Maybe it was menopause.

"I wonder if I'm starting menopause. Everything makes me want to..."

"What?" Leanne asked.

Miranda threw herself to the ground and rolled in the leaves, breathing in the damp of spring, the dust of last autumn. She lay on her back staring up at the blue sky just beyond the lacy canopy.

"Everything makes me want to weep with happiness," she said.

Would that it were menopause, she thought. She could sweat it out and emerge in a few years a calmer person with somewhat brittle bones. But this? This calm, deep satisfaction? This was madness. This sharp, painful sense of joy, of gratitude that felt like an inhalation of fresh, cool air. This soft exhalation that felt like peace.

Leanne swept a leaf from Miranda's face.

Peace? Miranda bit her lip. If peace burns, this is peace, she thought. If peace makes you tremble, this is definitely peace. If peace is feeling calm one minute, tortured the next, if peace is war, then, then, and only then is this peace.

She stared up at the canopy of leaves, the sun drifting down in dappled warmth. Why couldn't she just have a friend like everyone else? Maybe Annie was right — she was just a drama queen, couldn't live without it.

"Randa?"

She turned to Leanne and opened an eye. Oh, what a mess. "Yeah?"

Leanne twisted a stick in her hands as if she were about to start a fire. "Oh, nothing," she said.

Miranda rolled onto her back again. Leanne had called her Randa.

Suddenly a large little face hung over Miranda, its cheeks streaked with dirt.

"Now you're belly up," the little face explained.

When Miranda got back to the cottage late that afternoon, she found her mother writhing in pain on the couch.

"I can't turn my neck," Betty whispered. "My head is exploding. It keeps exploding."

The EMTs were volunteers. She recognized one — a blond girl she sometimes saw running on the beach. She followed the ambulance in the Mercedes, though later she had no memory of the drive.

"It's meningitis," Miranda told Annie over the phone.

"What?"

"No, it's okay, it's not the kind that kills you."

"Just the kind that makes you wish you were dead," Betty whispered from her hospital bed. "Please stop talking, darling."

But she did not want to be dead at all. She wanted to go back in time, not very far, not to when she was young, not to when she was still happily married to Joseph, just back to that afternoon before she went for a walk on the beach, to that moment when she stood looking out the kitchen window and saw the goldfinch fluttering through the maple leaves. She had been so unfair. She wanted to go back in time, to look out her kitchen window, to see the movement of the little bird, the flash of yellow and flash of black, as it rustled among the leaves, and she wanted to apologize. To the bird. It had been a pretty bird on a pretty day. She should never have doubted either one.

"I will never take another day for granted," she told Annie the next day when the antibiotics had begun to take effect and the pain had lessened, "and neither should you."

"Have you suddenly seen God?" Annie asked.

"Goodness, no. Why, have you?"

When Annie called Josie to tell him that Betty was sick, she had to fight off an irrational sense of I-told-you-so justification. How awful to celebrate your mother's pain because it shamed someone, even if that person deserved to be shamed. Yet when she said to Josie, "Mom is in the hospital with meningitis," she felt a distinct shiver of satisfaction.

19

Betty came home after six days, but she was very weak. After a few days in the cottage, she was even weaker, and Annie and Miranda took her to the doctor's office, each holding an arm.

"What a fuss," Betty said. "I just need rest."

But the doctor said she had caught a staph infection when she was in the hospital, and he put her on heavy doses of various antibiotics.

She insisted on getting out of bed each morning, however, and her daughters would settle her, in her sunglasses, on the living room couch when it was chilly and on the sunporch chaise, in her sunglasses, when it was warm. The sunglasses helped with the headaches.

"You look very glamorous," said Cousin Lou on one visit.

"It's my own private sanitorium." Her legs were covered with a blanket, a cup of broth in her hands.

Lou caught sight of the broom in the corner, grabbed it, and began to sweep absentmindedly.

"How is Mr. Shpuntov?" Betty asked.

"He hit his caregiver yesterday."

"Uh-oh."

"She hit him back. So that was fine. I wonder when the word went from caretaker to caregiver." He stood at the foot of Betty's chaise. She looked chalky and thin — her wrists protruded from her sweater, tight veined sinews. "How are you?" he said, suddenly serious.

Betty said, "I never hit my caregivers. Or my caretakers."

Annie came out with her mother's pills.

"Do I, Annie?"

"Hardly ever."

"Sit down, Lou," Betty said. "It's very pleasant, just sitting. I had no idea I would like being a patient so much. I highly recommend it. I think I have found the career at which I excel. Of course, I am still a widow. I won't give that up."

"Multitasking," Annie said. She was worried. Betty really did seem to like reclining on her chaise, staring out at the trees and the sky. She was dreamy and faraway, preoccupied.

"There's a goldfinch here," Betty was telling Cousin Lou as if it explained everything. "A goldfinch I see when I'm very quiet and patient."

Roberts came that evening and brought bunches of daffodils for Betty.

"This one is for you," he said, handing a stem to Annie.

He came almost every day now. Poor man, Annie thought. Miranda was hardly ever there, yet he sat so patiently, entertaining Betty with stories of some of his greediest clients and their twisted estates, often staying for dinner.

"Do you miss it? Do you mind being retired?" Betty asked. "Because we can get another chaise and you can come to my sanitorium. It keeps me busy."

"Oh, I keep my hand in. I have a few clients still."

"Like Charlotte Maybank? She seems very excited about her posthumous financial dealing."

Betty expected Roberts to smile as he did when regaling her with the eccentricities of clients and the absurdities of cases over the years. Instead, he set his jaw and said nothing. Betty said, "Sorry. None of my business."

Annie often came home from work to find them sitting in silence, the lengthening day casting a pale light on their faces. How tiny and frail her mother looked in her wispy black outfits beside Roberts, who was tan, almost ruddy, a tall, lean man in a tall, lean suit.

His face would crease into a smile when he saw her. He would rise from the invalid's side and lean over to kiss Annie's cheek. She would compliment his bow tie. And they would have cocktails.

"Miranda didn't pick you up at the station?" he asked on the first of these evenings, when Annie arrived alone.

Poor Roberts, she thought. "No Miranda. Just us chickens tonight, I'm afraid."

"Ah." He took a martini from her. "Did you walk from the station? You know, I could always come and get you, Annie, if Miranda's busy."

Annie smiled. Gallant Roberts. Very old-school. Like me, she thought. "I dropped Miranda off after she picked me up. At Leanne's. But how thoughtful of you."

He nodded. "Miranda's been a blessing to Leanne. Charlotte is a handful. But..." He paused here, then said, "Well, Charlotte's been going through so much."

Miranda was not coming home until much later, so Annie didn't ask him to stay for dinner. He joined them anyway.

Lonely, she thought. Not like me. What was the opposite of "lonely"? The word to describe someone who could not stand to be around people? "Togetherly"? "Loneless," she decided. Yet she found that he was one of the few people she did not feel like running away from. No hiding in the attic from Roberts. In fact, he rather reminded her of an attic, the air soft, the light filtered, the contents dusted with recognition or obscurity or gentle surprise.

Felicity decided to treat the girls, by which she meant Gwen, Amber, and Crystal, to lunch at Cafe des Artistes. Amber was such a... she smiled... she had been about to use the word "treasure," as if Amber were an exceptional maid of long service. There was something a little servile about the girl, in an ambitious way that Felicity recognized. Crystal was a silly nonentity, but Amber... even with her aging teenager slang... there was something about her. She was so attentive, and yet one felt the steel behind her acquiescence. She reminded Felicity of... Felicity. Which intrigued her. And then, all those free massages. Felicity was the envy of her friends.

She had never been to Cafe des Artistes, but it was an Upper West Side institution, and as she planned on becoming a proper Upper West Side institution herself, she thought she and Cafe des Artistes should meet. She had made a reservation for 1:00, and she left the office with plenty of time to get there, even with traffic. Taking cabs was a new luxury, taking cabs even when the subway ran directly to her destination. Her life had changed in many small ways like that, she thought with satisfaction. She had worked hard for these little luxuries, worked hard at the office, worked hard at making Joe happy. She did not begrudge either the office or Joe her sweat equity, she loved both her work and Joe, but sweat equity it was, and now she was getting her returns.