Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"Want me to keep bees, Mother?"

"If it would make you happy," Betty said. She paused. "Would it?"

"I'm okay," Miranda said, and turned back to the orange, making it clear the interview was over. The citrus scent drifted up. She waited for the thud of the newspaper on the muddy drive, then went out to lift the gritty blue plastic bag and carry it inside. By the time Annie returned in her lumpy wet suit and showered and dressed for work, Miranda had riffled through all the sections.

"I wish you wouldn't always crumple it up like that," Annie said, picking up sheets of the Times and smoothing them out.

"Just get another paper at the station if you don't like it."

"Typical."

"Of what?"

"Now, girls," Betty said abstractedly. But her heart wasn't in it, and Annie and Miranda, sensing it wasn't, scowled at each other like spoiled children until it was time for Miranda to drive Annie to the station. They left their mother staring blankly out the window, holding a coffee mug against her cheek, where her sinuses hurt.

"I'm sorry," Annie forced herself to say when they got in the car. "It's just a newspaper. I'm too old to act like this." She did not add that Miranda was also too old. "I've lived alone too long."

"You?" Miranda said. "What about me? Talk about living alone too long…"

Annie felt sororal rage rising. Was she not even able to apologize, to apologize so delicately, without it becoming a competition? "Green," she said in retaliation, when the traffic light turned and Miranda did not instantly gun the engine.

Miranda dropped her sister at the station, roared off in the noisy old Mercedes to the parking lot at Compo Beach, then walked along the road in the gloom until she reached Burying Hill beach. She did this every day. It would have been easier to drop Annie at the Greenfield Hill station, which was so much closer to Burying Hill, but she did not want Annie or anyone else to know where she was headed. She stared eastward, in the direction of Kit Maybank's aunt's house. It made her feel closer to Henry and Kit somehow, as if they were just around that rocky bit of coast ahead. She had called Kit several times. Once, she even spoke to Henry. Then Kit stopped answering her calls. Miranda had e-mailed him and gotten a quick, apologetic note in response-so busy, just impossible, soon… Of course, she had not heard from him again. It was as if Kit, and so Henry, had dropped off the face of the earth, her earth at least. She wondered who was looking after Henry. Kit had said one of his college roommates had a nanny who had a cousin. This didn't sound reassuring to Miranda. Poor Henry. She had offered to come to L.A. to look after him, but Kit had not really taken her suggestion seriously. And so they were gone, beyond her reach, out of earshot and out of sight, and she was here gazing eastward in the early November drizzle.

"Hi," someone said, coming up beside her.

Miranda jumped, hoping for a fraction of an instant that it was Kit, then stared at Roberts as if she didn't recognize him.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. But it's really starting to rain. Can I give you a ride home?" he asked, looking back at the beach's parking lot and seeing Miranda's car was not there. "Or did you paddle here in your trusty kayak?"

Miranda did not smile. She could not summon the social will on this her private, solitary walk. She just managed to mutter a thank you and decline the offer.

"I like to walk," she said.

"Okay," said Roberts.

After that morning, she would occasionally run into Roberts, who also seemed to like to walk. He never presumed to join her, for which she was grateful. He would pass her, going in the other direction, or come upon her as she stood silently admiring some somber moment of landscape. And he would incline his head in greeting. No more. Yet even that she found intrusive and jarring. Although she knew she was being unreasonable, she often varied the time of her walks in order to avoid him.

It did not help that he found his way to the cottage now and then for dinner. He's certainly made himself at home, she thought as she came in one evening and found him mulling wine in the kitchen.

"Doesn't the house smell delicious?" Betty said.

Annie threw Miranda an anxious glance. She hoped her sister would not insult Roberts. He stood at the stove looking so proud of his concoction. She moved toward him protectively, and stood beside him, as if her presence could shield him from the cold indifference of her sister.

Miranda sniffed the sweetened air and could not help but smile.

Relieved, Annie took a mug from Roberts. She wondered why Miranda thought he was so old. He was probably in his mid-, possibly late sixties, she realized. His face was creased, but not from age. It was a hearty, weather-beaten face. Miranda's aversion to him was a mystery to Annie. And an irritant. He was so much more suitable than Kit Maybank. It enraged Annie that Miranda was mourning so ostentatiously for someone who had treated her so badly.

"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?"