"He's your daughter," Cousin Lou yelled into his ear.
Miranda, pacing nervously in front of the picture window, did not hear Mr. Shpuntov or Cousin Lou or Rosalyn's cry of "Good Gawd!" Kit was gone. Henry was gone. Her little pretend family had driven away in that miniature car and boarded a plane for Los Angeles. She clenched her hands and opened them, clenched them, opened them, unaware that she was doing so. We could still be a little pretend family, she told herself. Kit could return in a week, two weeks. It was a small part, he had said so. Of course, it could be a small part that popped up frequently. He might be there for months. Who would take care of Henry? It was outrageous. A form of child abuse, really. Poor Henry, locked in a hotel room with some undocumented babysitter yakking in a foreign language on her cell phone. He would never learn to speak properly at this crucial juncture in his development. She had been online for hours last night reading about the progress of a two-year-old's speech. She would have to call Kit and explain it all to him. She checked her watch. They would be on the plane now. She hoped Kit had taken Henry's car seat on the plane and strapped him in. It was so much safer.
Miranda sat down with a small internal groan and began chewing on her thumbnail.
Betty wished Miranda wouldn't bite her nails. It was unattractive, and she was such a beautiful girl.
"That little Henry and his father were very taken with your sister," she said to Annie, who was slumped on a bench. "Are very taken, I should say. I wish they hadn't rushed off like that. It's lovely that Kit got some work, but Miranda seemed to be settling in to such a nice routine with them. Sit up straight, sweetheart."
"Mmm," Annie said. Frederick's children were not very taken with her, she thought. Though they clearly revered him. Perhaps that was why they seemed so possessive. Or did it have to do with their mother? Annie never asked what had become of Mrs. Frederick Barrow, but she did wonder. Had she died recently? Or was she, like Betty, dumped and destitute? What had she been like? What had she looked like? Did they still see each other? Or did he carry flowers to her grave and lie on the grass beside it and whisper to her? It was difficult to picture any of it, as she knew nothing at all about the wife and not much more about Frederick, but she pictured the two of them anyway, blurry, indistinct, far away.
It was therefore a shock when she saw her mother rushing enthusiastically away from her toward the door, through which walked a very real and sharply drawn Frederick, the very same Frederick Barrow she had been thinking about, who had just entered the room with the stern young woman Annie recognized as his daughter, Gwen, as well as a man who must have been her husband, and two little girls in matching velvet dresses.
It is too hot for velvet was Annie's first irrelevant thought, remembering many sweaty holiday dinners from her childhood. Rosh Hashanah is always too hot for velvet.
The night air swept in through the door with Frederick, Gwen, her husband, and the two pink little girls in cherry red velvet, the damp breath of the shore following them across the room like a ghost.
"New blood," Rosalyn whispered hungrily as she hurried toward the newcomers. She frequently experienced a sense of world-weary ennui with her husband's guests. Like many a collector of pottery or butterflies or vintage handbags, Rosalyn cared far more for the act of acquisition than she did for the guests in her extensive collection. Lou provided her with an ever-expanding list of names to remember and occupations to place in her own mental hierarchy, for which she was grudgingly grateful. But this new acquisition was, uncharacteristically, all her own. She had found Gwendolyn Barrow herself at a dreary evening of incomprehensible art and clannish New Yorkers at which the two bored women had fallen into a friendly discussion of Pilates versus Gyrotonic, Rosalyn coming down heavily, if such a slight and narrow person could be said to be heavy in any way, on the side of Gyrotonic, a view to which Gwen revealed she was just coming around. The two women bonded, and Rosalyn rather recklessly invited her new friend to Lou's Rosh Hashanah.