"Aren't you sort of burning your bridges?" Annie said.

"I certainly hope so."

"She's being proactive," Betty said. "That's a sign of self-esteem, you know."

Each day the shower rail separated a little more from the wall of the bathroom. Each night Annie lay in bed and tried not to think of their finances. That was how she began to divide her days: first the aluminum disk pulling away from the dull pink tile, bit by bit, while she showered (she swore she could see it moving), then the rush of panic in the shadowy nighttime room.

"We're running out of money," she ventured at breakfast.

"I was never good at money," Miranda said. "Obviously."

"Joseph always took care of everything," Betty said, shaking her head sadly. "Well, those days are gone."

And so they both, each in her own unassuming way, assumed Annie would somehow take care of the finances.

Her sublet apartment, unlike her current roommates, was rolling up its sleeves, putting its shoulder to the grindstone and earning its keep. But there was still Charlie's medical school and Nick's college tuition, only partly paid for by loans. It didn't leave Annie much. Her mother had even less, with any eventual divorce settlement a long way off. Miranda, meanwhile, saw only an occasional royalty check from her once popular and now disgraced authors, but even her tithe, as she called it, was withheld while the legal cases worked themselves out. She appeared to have otherwise run through every penny she had ever earned.

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.