And so they both, each in her own unassuming way, assumed Annie would somehow take care of the finances.
Her sublet apartment, unlike her current roommates, was rolling up its sleeves, putting its shoulder to the grindstone and earning its keep. But there was still Charlie's medical school and Nick's college tuition, only partly paid for by loans. It didn't leave Annie much. Her mother had even less, with any eventual divorce settlement a long way off. Miranda, meanwhile, saw only an occasional royalty check from her once popular and now disgraced authors, but even her tithe, as she called it, was withheld while the legal cases worked themselves out. She appeared to have otherwise run through every penny she had ever earned.
Sitting at the table trying to make a budget, Annie said, "There's very little coming in and there's way too much going out."
The other two nodded, then continued to read the newspaper.
When Annie said it again, louder, Miranda patiently explained that writing down all their debts did not miraculously supply the family with more money. The point of a budget was not to miraculously conjure up more money, Annie answered. The point was to figure out realistically how much they could afford to spend. Betty said she thought it would be far more practical to have more money, miraculously or otherwise, and Annie gave up, sitting with her pencil and her calculations in lonely, resentful silence.
That night, as every night, the bills rose up in her memory and haunted her. She turned in her bed, twisted in the sheets. The thin moonlight came in through her window. It was cold and white, like a marble tomb. She was hot and flushed and alive with worry.
Her anger and frustration with her mother and sister, however, were just bits of sand caught in the wind of her true rage. That was saved for Josie and, now, Felicity as well. Annie still could not believe that the person behind all their suffering was Frederick Barrow's sister.
"And to think Rosalyn invited that treacherous family to Rosh Hashanah," she said one evening as they sat glumly before the faux fire. "Maybe that's why Frederick was so weird."
"You said he wasn't weird," Miranda muttered.
"Well, he was."
"Listen," Betty said abruptly, "I'll just have to get a job."
"What are you going to do, Mom? Greet people at Walmart?"
Betty leaned toward her, suddenly animated. "Is Walmart as nice as Costco?"
It was therefore with great relief that the three women accepted an invitation to visit Lou and Rosalyn in Palm Springs.
"It's our fiftieth wedding anniversary," Rosalyn said when she called. "Can you believe it?"
Betty congratulated her coldly.
"Against all the odds," Rosalyn said.
"And how is your father?" Betty asked to parry the indelicacy. "How is Mr. Shpuntov?"
"The desert agrees with him."
Betty imagined a towering dune nodding polite assent to Mr. Shpuntov.
"Well," she said more cheerfully, "that's something, then."
"Now, Betty," Rosalyn said in a pedagogical tone that got Betty's back up whenever she heard it. It was Rosalyn's docent voice. "Now, Betty, listen, and don't be stubborn. Lou and I both miss you and the girls."
Betty walked out to the sunporch. There was no sun, just weak, struggling light. The sky was overcast and dull. It had rained the night before and the trees were still dark with wet. She was cold on the unheated sunporch. There was nothing to do there, nothing to see, nothing even to hear, no birds or passing children. She stood suspended in a winter void, only the damp cold and the musty smell of old carpet penetrating the deprivation.
"We miss you, too," she said. And perhaps the girls did miss Lou and Rosalyn now and then, she really didn't know. As for herself, she missed only one person.
"We want you all to come out here for Christmas. Our treat, of course. My father was saying the other day that in all his years he had never seen people who were so generous to their friends, but you know us, Betty--that's just the way we are. And I don't want you to start giving me excuses about why you can't come. A trip will do you good, Betty. Lou and I are worried about you. Even my father mentioned it to me just the other day. Sitting there in that hut, of course you get what you pay for, no disrespect to the landlords. Ha! I make myself laugh. But there you are. No one to talk to. Except your daughters, of course. How lucky you are to have daughters. Still, I manage very well, don't I, even without children? Lou and his Like Family. I have to laugh." And she did.
Betty, who had not been listening but had heard the words lucky and daughters, said, "Oh yes," in an absent voice.