Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"It is sort of tragic," Miranda said apologetically to Kit, who took the gasping child and tried to comfort him. "But who ever pays attention to the words? Except for them maybe being about pot."

"Really? I never knew that."

Kit replaced Henry on her lap, and the little boy wiped his face in her sweater. She patted his silky head as if he were a cat, feeling the sweet pressure of his face against her. My little pussycat, she thought, feeling oddly shy, unable to say it out loud.

Kit was still so young that his own childhood was very much alive for him. When he spoke about his family and his youth, his face lit up. Then he gave a relaxed sigh, like someone after a good meal.

Why, he was young enough to be her assistant.

The perfect assistant, an assistant who took over one's life. He poured coffee for her from a thermos. He peeled an orange and passed her bright, perfect sections. He handed her ropes and told her to pull them taut or release them slowly. This, this was what she had been searching for in an assistant all these years-a skipper.

Then, reaching across the little boy, who was thoughtfully sucking on a plastic dinosaur, Kit had put his smooth hand beneath her chin. He had moved his thumb softly across her cheek. And she had seen that in spite of his age and his competence, he was neither her assistant nor her skipper. That there was no hierarchy involved in their relationship, none at all.

"I'm so lucky," he said. He looked down at Henry's shining hair, then turned his pale eyes back to Miranda. "Always have been." He smiled, a tight, ironic half smile and closed his eyes. "And so grateful," he added. "So fucking grateful."

There was something touching about his declaration, as though he knew all his happiness, even his memories of happiness, could be snatched away.

"Lucky to be lucky," she said, for she suddenly felt lucky, too. Her business was falling apart. Her reputation was ruined. The sky was blue. The wind filled the white sail. A child hummed a tuneless song beside her. She was skimming the water. She was still, motionless, swift.

No, no, bad idea, Miranda, she had forced herself to think then, but of course he had kissed her. He'd opened his eyes, looked into hers and somehow the distance between them, an expanse of sea air and sunlight and decades, had disappeared.

Miranda recalled that first kiss with a private smile. She watched Annie in the kitchen, catching a glimpse of an elbow, an arm, a general bustling beyond the doorway. Annie worried too much. It was very stressful, worry was. Took its toll on your health. Not to mention your skin. She had bought Annie some La Mer cream, which really did work miracles, but all Annie did was work herself up over the cost. Annie needed perspective. Life was not just about material things. She thought of little Henry. That's what life was about, the little Henrys. Annie had her boys, it was true, but they were grown. She needed someone to take their place, if not in her heart, then at least in her life.

"I wonder how Frederick is," she called out to Annie. "You should call him, Annie. Get him to drive down."

Annie yanked the silverware drawer open. One of the unwelcome side effects of her sister's new fascination with Kit Maybank and his little sidekick was a newfound and frequently vocalized interest in Frederick Barrow. She reached in the drawer. "Shit!" she said, pricking her finger on a steak knife someone had put in with the forks.

"Don't be so controlling, dear," her mother said, having no idea what Annie was complaining about but sure it had to do with her totalitarian views of the kitchen. As if Betty had not had a kitchen for over fifty years.

"I cut myself," Annie said, going into the bathroom for a Band-Aid.

"Don't bleed on the napkins. Although that OxiClean is supposed to be wonderful. And use Neosporin. Cuts heal three times faster."

Betty had begun watching daytime TV and found it extraordinarily informative and reassuring. There were so many problems in the world she had never thought of, and so many products to solve them.

In the bathroom, her cut throbbing a little in its bandage, Annie stared at herself in the mirror and wondered, not for the first time, what she really looked like. As other people saw her. It didn't seem to mean anything, the way she saw herself, for it changed with her mood. I'm not bad-looking, she decided, as she so often did. Whatever that meant.

Was that what Frederick had seen? A middle-aged woman, not bad-looking, who took very good care of herself, as she would have taken care of a rare first edition? She plucked her eyebrows and had her lip waxed regularly. She used night cream at night and day cream in the morning and sunscreen even in winter. Her makeup was natural-looking, but she never left the bathroom in the morning without it. She swam almost every morning. Her hair was the same natural-looking brown of every other middle-class middle-aged woman who went once a month to have it colored. She was not exceptional, but she was not exceptionable. She was, she realized with a mixture of pride and self-pity, conscientious.

It had been a month since she'd seen Frederick, or even heard from him. Ever since he'd gone up to Massachusetts after his reading. That night, while waiting for his car at the parking garage, he had sent her a text message thanking her again for arranging the event, saying he would miss her and urging her to visit him in Cape Cod. Then-nothing. She was deeply disappointed, but not really surprised. Frederick Barrow was an important person. She was not. There was a reason he was important, there was a reason she was not, there was an order to the universe that kept the important people in their important sphere and the unimportant people living with their mother and sister in a borrowed shack. Still, sometimes an important man like Frederick was in New York City and sought out an unimportant but quite intelligent and pleasant woman like Annie. It had happened before, it might happen again; in fact, she was sure it would happen again in some desultory fashion. It was not enough, but it would have to be enough-to have a friend like Frederick, a friend she saw when it suited him, when he had time, when he was in town.

Annie was used to being alone. There were people who felt they didn't exist if they were alone, who needed to be talking and listening to others all the time. But Annie felt acutely alive when she was by herself, when she was silent, when she was surrounded by silence. She sometimes looked at the books on the shelves in the library and felt a kinship with them, so full, so still, so potent.

Her sister, of course, had always been just the opposite. She had reveled in talk, whether on the phone or in person, her own or that of the couple at the next table at a restaurant-the more people around her, the happier she was. Though she had never entertained like Cousin Lou, she had always taken her clients and their editors out, filling up almost every meal of almost every day-breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the choice calculated using her own internal and complicated formula, a successful author getting dinner, as well as one who had hit hard times. But she did these things, ate these meals, not in a great flourish of hospitality like Lou, but out of fascination. Miranda loved problems. She loved turning problems into stories and stories into gold.

"I am an alchemist," she would say. "And a nightmare."

Annie knew she herself was neither an alchemist nor a nightmare. Perhaps that was why Frederick had disappeared. Yet she was sure he had liked her. Really liked her. And she was sure she had liked him. She would let her thoughts go no further in that direction. She had liked him. In a way she had not liked anyone in a long, long time. In a way that left her hollow without him. In a way she would push out of her mind.