"Oh, Mom, that can wait. Let's worry about your health now . . ."
"You can worry about two things at once, Annie," Betty said, smiling. "I've seen it firsthand. I want you to go in." She paused. She reached out and held Annie's hand in her own left hand, Miranda's in her right. "I want you to go," she said.
Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, said the page.
"I want that rotten, selfish, dirty bastard to face you," Betty said. Her eyes were fierce. "Both of you."
Miranda and Annie stared at their mother.
"He owes you that," Betty said. "Rest his soul," she added gently.
The doctor appeared eventually, a youngster in a white coat. Betty's staph infection had gotten worse, he said. Pneumonia . . . intravenous antibiotics . . . couldn't possibly go home . . . at her age . . . lucky to have survived the meningitis . . . at her age . . . at her age . . . at her age . . .
Annie had mechanically taken notes. When she tried to decipher them when she got home, she said, "Just words. A bunch of meaningless words. All I really heard was at her age. She's not even that old. That little punk doctor."
She lay down on Betty's chaise.
"Don't worry, Annie," Miranda said in a worried voice. "She'll be okay."
It was the first time Annie could remember Miranda comforting her. It terrified her. Things must be very bad indeed.
Miranda called Leanne, who promised to call the hospital and see, doctor to doctor, what was really going on.
"She'll go in and see her in the afternoon, too, when Henry's napping. Hilda can keep an eye on him."
Miranda seemed so proud, Annie thought, as if Leanne's generous behavior reflected on her somehow. "That's great," she said, and Miranda beamed.
Then Annie called Cousin Lou's house to see if Rosalyn could go to the hospital in the morning.
"Oh, she can't possibly, she'll drive your poor mother crazy. No, God, no. I'll go, though. I'm more soothing, aren't I? I cheer people up. I'll go. Rosalyn is much too nervous right now. This business has been a terrible strain on her."
"What business? Mom in the hospital?" Leave it to Rosalyn to turn this into her own malady.
"No, no. Those two girls from Palm Springs. It's gotten all topsy-turvy."
Annie almost moaned. She did not care about Amber and her antics right now. She did not even care about Frederick. What was done was done. She cared only about her mother.
"One of them seems to have run off with that Barrow fellow," Cousin Lou was saying. "Gweneth is mad as a wet hen . . ."
Where did her cousin ever come up with that colloquial American expression? Annie wondered irrelevantly.
"Rosalyn has been on the phone with hysterical women all day. She's devastated. And with a baby coming . . ."
Annie said, "Cousin Lou, I'm sorry Rosalyn is in such a state, but can you go to the hospital tomorrow morning or not? I kind of have to know."
"What am I? Family? Or family? First thing in the morning."
20
The meeting took place in an office with a view of the Hudson River. Miranda stared out at a motionless barge roosting in the river's fawn-colored water.
"Garbage scow," she said. "Poor old garbage scow."
Josie's lawyer looked up irritably from his papers. Josie laughed.
"Only you would feel sorry for a garbage scow," he said gently.
"Don't patronize me."
Josie looked genuinely shocked. "Miranda . . ."
The door opened and the forensic accountant, Mr. Mole, entered, a fat man who looked as if he should have been named Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. Behind him, to Miranda's surprise, loped Roberts, a briefcase in his hand.
"You turn up in the oddest places," Annie said, but for once Roberts, with his lanky formality, seemed a perfect fit. He slid into a chair at the head of the table, folded his long fingers together, and gazed out comfortably over his pale blue bow tie.
"Shall we begin?" he said.
"Semiretired," Miranda said half to herself.
They signed the papers in silence, the ballpoint pens scratching.
"Now," Josie said, smiling, "I told you girls I would be generous!"
Annie looked at the man who had been until very recently her father, and she knew that sometime in the future he would be her father again. Not because she forgave him. It was not her place to forgive him, really, he hadn't divorced her, and anyway, she didn't forgive him, her place or not, and she never would. It was not that she would forget, either, although she supposed she might, one so often did, with years and years to fade the colors of memory. But it was for neither of those reasons that Josie would somehow leech back into her heart. It was because she loved him.
She just did not love him right now.
"Oh, Josie," she said sadly, and she stood up to give him a lingering embrace, taking in the feel of his fatherly cheek, his fatherly soapy smell. "You really have been a complete shmuck."
"Lunch?" he said rather pathetically, turning from Annie to Miranda and back again.