Miranda peered at the bracelet. "Very Goth, Mom."
"Queen Victoria wore jet when she was in mourning for Prince Albert," Annie said. "Which was the rest of her life."
Betty nodded her approval.
"Of course, he was actually dead, unlike other widows' husbands I could name. She started a whole fashion."
"Well, now everyone wears black already," Betty said. "So I don't see what difference I could make. Nevertheless, the bracelet was only two hundred dollars. See how much I'm economizing?"
Annie wanted to shake her mother until her pretty little head wobbled on its aged neck. We are broke, she wanted to cry out. We do not have two hundred dollars to spend on baubles. But her mother was so wounded, and she was trying, in her odd and spendthrift way, to be brave. Annie took a deep breath. She put out the white linen napkins bought years ago in France, if she remembered correctly. "When the Mitfords' mother needed to economize," she said, "she found out how much the laundering of their napkins cost per week."
Normally Miranda would have commented on two pedantic outbursts in such a short period of time, but she was more indulgent of the Mitford family, awed by the number of memoirs, biographies, and scandals the sisters had generated.
"She thought it was too expensive," Annie continued, "so they just stopped using napkins."
"But think of the cleaning bills for their clothes," Betty said, clucking. "Although they could have used paper towels, I suppose . . ."
Betty and Joseph's housekeeper, a Brazilian woman named Jocasta who had retired last year, had always gotten the napkins snowy white and ironed them into crisply folded rectangles. When they first came to the cottage, Betty had suggested sending them to the dry cleaner, or at least the fluff-and-fold laundry downtown called the Washing Well, but Annie had put her foot down.
"We have a washer and a dryer. It's about the only thing that works in this house, so we might as well use it and not waste money."
She was, therefore, responsible for the napkins herself. They had acquired a few yellow stains, she noticed, and she certainly was not going to stand around for hours watching soap operas and ironing them the way Jocasta had. She placed the rumpled stained cloths beside her mother's good china. The napkins looked disgruntled, rebellious, like a crowd of disheveled revolutionaries. Maybe they should use paper towels, after all.
"Wash your hands before dinner, girls," Betty said.
Girls again. Could you re-create your childhood in a new place at an advanced age and without one of the key players? Annie wondered. For better or for worse, that's what they seemed to be doing. Oh, Josie, what were you thinking, leaving us here to play house, three place settings instead of four? "The Odd Trio" Miranda had dubbed them, but it was clear from the outset that they were, all three, the fussy one, each pursing her lips in disapproval of the other two, each missing the man who was not there.
"I can't imagine what all the neighbors think we're doing here, three old broads in this ramshackle house," Annie said as she watched a woman walk a big galloping black dog down the street.
"Oh, they think we're Russians," Betty said.
"Why?"
"Because that's what I told them."
Annie pressed her forehead against the window. Russians?
"Refugees!" Miranda said, delighted. "Cousin Lou must like that."
"Yes. I said we had all lost our poor husbands."
"How?" Annie asked.
"KGB, dear. How else?"