"Roberts is such a lovely man. And, by the way, I am very disappointed in Kit Maybank," Betty said to Annie that night when Roberts had gone and Miranda was out taking a final solitary walk. "Has she heard from him at all?"

Annie shrugged. Miranda had certainly not confided in her. "Maybe he'll come back for Thanksgiving to spend it with his aunt. But, Mother, I don't think we should make too much of this friendship. I mean, Miranda has her enthusiasms, that's what makes her Miranda, but she's about to turn fifty, for God's sake. She can't just keep pining for, well, you know, a kid half her age."

"You're so literal-minded, Annie. She isn't pining for Kit. I mean, really! She's not a teenager."

"That's what I just said. That's my point."

"You and your points," Betty said indulgently. "Anyway, it's the child she wants. I would have thought that was obvious, poor thing."

Not for the first time, Annie wondered at her mother's acuity. And at her own lack of it.

Ever since they had come to Westport, a little over three months ago, Miranda and Annie had been avoiding Josie's calls. At first, when they were still willing to speak to him, they had tried to point out the error of his ways. He had answered that this was how things had to be, in a tone of such firm resignation that he might just as easily have been saying it was God's will.

"The roof leaks," Miranda screamed into her cell phone. "There are mouse droppings on the sunporch."

"You've beggared our mother, your wife," Annie yelled into her office phone. "Have you no shame?"

"Josie, you have to help her," they both pleaded. "If you really understood what was going on, you wouldn't do this. Please let Mommy come home."

After a while they realized that Josie did not want to understand what was going on, and they stopped calling him. They stopped answering his calls, as well. It had been months since either of them had heard his voice on anything but an answering machine.

Then Betty informed them that there was a standing lamp in the apartment that she absolutely had to have. Annie pointed out that there was no room in the cramped and cluttered cottage for another lamp. Miranda said Josie had probably sold the lamp anyway. But a few days later, Miranda and Annie found themselves driving their mother's old car into the city to pick up the lamp. It was Annie who had finally agreed to call Josie at his office to arrange the time.

"Josie? It's Annie."

"I know it's you, honey. How many people call me that?"

Annie thought she heard a catch in his voice. Do not weaken, she told herself.

"I've been calling you," Josie said, his voice hurt.

"I know." She glanced at the three pink memos with his name on them sitting on her desk.

"Well, never mind. Now you've called me back. How are you girls? How's your mother?"

"Look, I just need to get into the apartment. Mom wants the standing lamp from the bedroom." Annie hesitated, then said, "From her bedroom."

There was silence.

"Josie?"

"Okay. Right. I'll have Ozzie bring it down for you. Any day you say."

Ozzie was the handyman. Annie wondered if Ozzie missed her mother.

"That's okay," she said. "I have a key. I just wanted to let you know."

"Mmm," Josie said. "Well, actually, I had the locks changed."

Annie said, "What?" but she had heard him.

"It just seemed prudent," he said.

"Jesus, Josie."

"I know."

"Prudent? Jesus."

Then neither of them said anything. And neither one hung up.

"I'm sorry, honey," Josie finally murmured. "I'm so sorry."

Annie was in her office. It was a small room in the back of the building on the ground floor. There was a window that faced a wall covered with ivy. The window needed to be washed. Her back was aching. She hadn't gone swimming in a week. It was getting too cold, even with a wet suit. Maybe tomorrow she would go to the Y. She thought these things, noticed the shaft of thin city light that slanted in through the window and landed on her desk, but what she really thought was Oh, Josie. Josie, how could you?

"When are you coming?" he asked.

"Saturday."

"Right. Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Annie thought, This is the man who brought me up, the man who was a father to me.

"Look, have dinner with me, okay?" Josie said. "You and Miranda?"

Annie was about to say no when he added in a truly pathetic voice, "Please?"

Now she and Miranda were driving into the city to pick up a useless lamp and have dinner with a useless father-manque.

"I hate him," Miranda said. "Why are we doing this?"

"Beats me. I weakened, I guess. His voice... it was heartbreaking."

"Hmmph." Miranda crossed her arms and held them against her chest, pouting. "I think men are big babies."

"Infantile grandiosity. I've always liked the sound of that. Rolls off the tongue."

"But real children aren't grandiose. They're actually grand. Look at Henry, for example."

Annie pictured Henry on the floor of the living room, four adults gazing adoringly at him as he pushed a car in circles. She remembered, too, a moment later in that same day. Henry had fallen asleep with Betty on the couch. Kit and Miranda, returning from a walk, had just come up the battered cement steps, leaving the door from the outside to the sunporch open. Annie was at the window facing the sunporch, picking dead roses from a bunch Kit had brought them a week earlier, and she was just aware of them, in the corner of her vision. They stood, one on each side of the door. Kit put out his hand and touched Miranda on the shoulder, a gentle, single, petting motion, like the soft swat of a cat. And they had both laughed softly and privately.

Annie wished she had not witnessed this scene. It meant that much more worry. She had always worried about Miranda. Even when Miranda was riding high, Annie had kept an eye on her younger sister. It was a remnant of childhood — a wariness of her sister, who demanded so much and seemed to devour the bulk of their parents' attention. It was also a source of power for Annie, a self-protective self-importance that translated into an almost prim protectiveness of Miranda. She had understood this even as a little girl. If Annie did not look after Miranda, what other role was there for her? Only resentment, and resentment was such an uncomfortable sentiment. Annie loved Miranda, found her impossible not to love, and very early on she had discovered a way to love her with dignity: worry.

Such good friends, Annie told herself when she saw Kit and Miranda that day from the sunporch. Friends, she thought again, trying to convince herself. And then, unable to hold out against her own eyes, the admission: lovers. She'd felt suddenly envious of Miranda and sorry for her all at once.

But as soon as Kit and Miranda came into the living room, it was as if the handsome young man at her side vanished. Miranda stood before the sofa, her face, that lively, determined face, shifting, suddenly and beautifully. A transformation, Annie thought at the time. Peace, she thought. Miranda at peace. And she had followed her sister's gaze, an almost palpable emanation of simple, complete happiness, to its destination, a small child, blinking, sucking his thumb, his pretty mouth curling in a smile around his little fist.

"How is little Henry, anyway?" Annie asked now as they drove against the shimmer of the setting sun.

Miranda said nothing.

Perhaps she had not heard. Annie glanced at her silent sister, profiled against the window, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

Impassive, wordless, Miranda turned to face the window and the passing prickly November woods beyond.

Annie did not repeat the question.

Josie was meeting them at a tiny bistro they had all liked "when the family was intact," as Miranda put it. "He could have chosen a more neutral place."

"I don't think he wants to be neutral."

"Fat chance," Miranda said.

"That he can be or that he wants to be?"

"I don't know, Annie. Why do you always have to make so much sense? You know what I mean."

And Annie, after a moment of reflexive annoyance, had to admit that, yes, she did know exactly what her sister meant.

Josie had not yet arrived, but their table was ready, their usual table; he must have requested it, for the restaurant was busy. They sat and waited, neither of them sure what her feelings were. Then he walked in, and they were overcome by waves of love, embarrassment, and penetrating anger.

He looked older and younger at the same time. What is that about? Annie wondered. She had not seen him in months, and here he was, her Josie, smaller somehow, grayer, thinner, but his step was so jaunty, the way he moved his arms, so light and carefree. How dare he be carefree when her mother could barely walk beneath her load of care?

"I miss you girls," he said.

"Whose fault is that?" Miranda said.

Joseph stared at his two daughters, his little girls. Miranda sat with crossed arms, her lower lip jutting out, the way she had when she was truly a little girl. She glared at him, which was on the whole less unsettling than Annie, who did not even look at him. Oh, what had he done? His whole life was gone, just like that. Betty was gone, Betty and her picnics. It had been their joke, that she turned everything into a picnic. She turned everything into an outing, even a trip to the motor vehicles bureau to turn in the license plates of their old car. Oh, we'll go together, she had said. Let's go to the one downtown! We'll take a walk along the water, see the ships like the tourists. It's not a picnic, he had said, as he so often did. They could have had such a nice old age, an old age full of unlikely picnics. But picnics were old-fashioned entertainments, and he wasn't ready for his old age. Felicity had reached down a firm young hand and fished him out of that murky bog.