It was Annie, then, who worried about money. But Annie was far better at worrying in general, and worrying about money was one of her specialties. She did not resent her mother and sister for dumping their financial load on her back. In fact, she felt better when she was organizing them than when she was taking care of her own insistently precarious business, for her finances, always a juggling act, the nonprofit world seeming to take its mandate seriously and to apply it rigorously to its employees, were now more than ever the stuff of nightmares. And nightmares are what Annie had, some while she was asleep, some while she sat at her desk at the library, some on the subway. The worry would rise, like a damp rotten smell, and she would try to quicken her step, to hurry past it. She would talk herself back to the letter she was answering regarding the library's acquisition of a collection of correspondence, or she would amuse herself with a quote from the man she had chosen as her new role model, Mr. Micawber, and the odor of insolvency would temporarily recede. But later, invariably, the ugly stench would creep back into her consciousness: Nick still in college, Charlie in medical school, all those loans — she tried to help them as much as she could — the maintenance on the apartment up 10 percent, her Con Ed bill through the roof, her phone bills — how could there be so many phone bills for one person — and then the cable bill and the Internet, and every time she went out to dinner, could it really cost fifty dollars for pasta and a glass of wine, and as for retirement, did people really save? How? She had always assumed she would inherit a little something that would help her along in her old age, but no more. Old age was now, too, caught up in the stink of financial worry. She was a successful woman in her early fifties and cutting corners the way she had as a graduate student. She had mortgaged her apartment up to its nostrils and had been living off that money and the home-equity line of credit she was able to get. She had always assumed she could sell her apartment as a last resort. That would be difficult in this market, but even if she did manage to sell it, what then? Where would she go? A person had to live someplace. The way her friends filled out Sudoku grids, in an obsessive attempt to make the numbers come out right and thereby exercise and protect their already failing memories, Annie drew her own grids, adding up mortgage and loan payments and maintenance checks, comparing the total to what she would have to pay in rent, trying to take into account the tax deductions she received because of her mortgage. This was how she put herself to sleep at night, too, or how she kept herself awake, adding, subtracting, sighing, twisting, grimacing in the dark.

Then one evening, when she was packing up her own apartment, boxing all her personal items so that the people coming to sublet it could not snoop through her papers, though why they would want to or what of interest they would find there she really couldn't imagine, Annie found a letter from her grandmother, Betty's mother, who had died ten years earlier.

Darling Annie, it said. Here is a birthday check to celebrate this wonderful day when you turn eleven years old! Use it wisely. Grandpa worked hard so that I would have a cushion to lie back upon. Always remember, dear Annie, these wise words that your grandmother told you: When you have enough money, you can thumb your nose at the world!

It was signed Your Loving Grandma. 

4

They made their exodus from New York to Westport on a beautiful August day.

"It will be just like the commune," said Miranda, who, though her youth had caused her to miss out on the fun of the sixties by a scant couple of years, harbored a rich nostalgia for the period.

"Right. The one in the French Revolution." Had she really agreed to this? Although, when Annie allowed herself to do so, she did have to admit that with both boys gone, she was as lonely as she had ever been in her life.

The three Little Bo Peeps who have lost their sheeps, she thought. Betty minus Josie, Miranda minus the Awful Authors, Annie minus her children. Three minus everything equaled three zeroes. Three zeroes equaled pathos; emptiness; fear. Zero at the bone, she thought. The Emily Dickinson poem made her feel better for a moment. A transport of cordiality. Emily Dickinson made even fear feel rich and full and active.

From the backseat, she looked at her mother's profile as Betty drove her old Mercedes along the Merritt Parkway, exclaiming at the beauty of every stone bridge, remembering when this quaint, narrow, twisting road was new and modern, and Annie felt a wave of respect. Her mother was her own poet. Betty didn't need Emily Dickinson to tell her that seeing a snake dividing the grass like a comb was a shiver of mortality and that mortality was a sign of life. Betty could take pleasure in anything, even this exile. She could make her devastating divorce into a picnic, that word that had made her cry. That is what Josie had always said about Betty's excursions into unlikely optimism. "It's not a picnic," he would say, his voice full of exasperated love, and he and Betty would look at each other and smile. Annie leaned forward, the seat belt tight across her chest, and kissed her mother's cheek.

Betty made a loud kissing noise in response, but kept her eyes on the road. She and her parents had visited Westport frequently in her youth — whenever Aunt Millie checked herself in to the Westport Sanitarium, a large white mansion on the Post Road that then housed wealthy alcoholics and manic-depressives, both of which diagnoses described Aunt Millie. The sanitarium had been torn down years ago and turned into a park.

"Just terrible," Betty murmured, shaking her head at the unfortunate transformation as they drove past the vanished sanitarium, now rolling acres of parkland.

Annie raised her eyebrows and made a face, hoping to catch Miranda's eye in the rearview mirror. But Miranda was gazing out the window at what was now called Winslow Park and sighing in sympathetic, wistful appreciation of the lost mental institution. Miranda always sat in the front. She had gotten carsick in the back, ever since she was a child. As a teenager, Annie had wondered once when they were out driving with their parents if Miranda might not have grown out of it.

"I mean, how can we ever tell, if she never sits in the backseat again?" she asked her mother, who had been banished to the backseat beside her.

"That's the beauty of irony, dear," Betty had said, and Annie never brought it up again.

Now she momentarily panicked at the idea of the months ahead with her sister and mother, then firmly reminded herself that she had finally agreed to the Houghteling Cottage scheme only because she saw that if she did not, the two of them would go ahead without her and live in what they considered genteel poverty until there was not a cent left in either of their bank accounts, at which point they would have to move in with her.

She reminded herself that she still had an apartment, that she had sublet it, furnished, for only ten months. Surely within that time the evacuation to the suburbs would lose its charm for Betty and Miranda.

Betty turned onto a tree-shaded road that eventually led them to the shore. Long Island Sound lay before them in its comfortable modesty, a small, calm stretch of blue. The sky was clear and Long Island, a dark wavy line, was visible on the horizon.

Miranda said, "It's hardly Cape Cod."

"We don't have any cousins in Cape Cod." Her sister had been out to Westport countless times. Did she expect crashing waves and towering dunes?

Still Annie said in a coaxing voice, "Fitzgerald lived here. He and Zelda were kicked out of two houses in Westport, I think."

Miranda seemed mollified. "Two houses," she whispered, looking at the Sound with new respect.

"Zelda swam at Compo Beach," Annie added encouragingly, realizing as she spoke that she could quit the Y in New York and save a little money, swim here herself. "No waves, perfect length, up and down, and you've done your laps..."

"Oh, Annie. You and your laps."

The cottage, on the other hand, was another story. Annie's heart sank when they pulled into the narrow dirt driveway beside the house itself. It was an unpromising sight, a slightly lopsided structure built in 1929, its shingles painted a dull, tired gray. A sunporch ran the length of the front of the cottage, its louvered windows quaint and outdated and yellowed. An overgrown hedge rose on one side of a dirt path leading to the louvered front door. With one corner wedged in the dirt, the rickety gate stood open, as listless as an idling bystander, unconcerned with, unaware of, the ramshackle house. The hard dusty path sidled shamelessly into the patchy crabgrass.

The cottage.

It was a shack, a hut, a garden shed of a thing, stunted and unwashed.

"Oh," Annie said in dismay.

But her sister and mother were already out of the car and exclaiming with joy. It was so unspoiled! It was so old-fashioned, so perfectly old-fashioned! Think of all the barefooted children who had scampered up and down this path! The commuters in their fedoras, tired and grimy from the train! The two women were beside themselves.

"It's like camp!" Miranda cried.

"Girl Scout camp!" Betty cried in response.

Of course, Annie knew well enough that Betty would have tired of real Girl Scout camp the minute she wanted a hot bath and there was only a cold shower to be had, that Miranda would exclaim over the unspoiled nature of the cottage until the first hot night without air-conditioning. But Annie said nothing. She knew better than to confront her mother and sister when they were waxing poetic together. It would be like stepping into a dog fight. One had to wait, patient and quiet, until they wore themselves out.