Good Harbor

Kathleen rolled down the window and took a deep breath, letting herself feel how much she wanted to be in school next fall. The kindergarten class included several “grand-students” — children born to parents she had taught. At the open house last month, she’d met SueEllen Puello’s daughter, Jasmine, a delicious girl with big black eyes. And she had a feeling that Alex Maceo would be a lot like his dad, an active boy she’d turn into a reader.

Then they were at the A. Piatt Andrew Bridge, which meant almost home. Hal and Jack used to compete to see which one of them could say it the most times as they drove over.

“A. Piatt Andrew?” Buddy asked, grinning. “A. Piatt Andrew. A. Piatt Andrew. A. Piatt Andrew. A. Piatt Andrew. A. Piatt Andrew. A. Piatt Andrew.

“How many was that, Mom?” he asked, the way the boys would ask, every time.

The tide was high and bright in the midday sun.

She might yet see grandchildren. Please, God. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Please. And thank You.

MAY

JOYCE groaned when she found out that her book group had chosen Anna Karenina. She groaned again when she opened it and faced the barrage of -evitches, -ovitches, and -ovnas. She couldn’t keep any of the names straight and, after one hundred pages, put the book down.

“I give up,” she said.

Frank, beside her in bed watching the news, said, “Does it matter? You always say Marie dominates the whole conversation, anyway.”

It was true. “The whole group feels more and more like homework, anyway,” Joyce said. “Other women’s book groups seem to have more fun.”

Frank, apparently mesmerized by the weather report, said nothing.

“Hello? Frank?”

He turned to her. “So quit and find another one that’s more fun.”

“What a rotten thing to say.”

“What? If you don’t like this group, why not make a change?”

Joyce turned her back on Frank, switched off the bedside lamp, and fumed. She’d missed a few meetings, but she couldn’t afford to quit her book group entirely.

She was lonely. After four years of working at home, she had started to feel like a hermit. Her coworkers at the magazine had stopped inviting her to lunch a while ago; she’d just said no too many times.

But that wasn’t the main source of her isolation; she hadn’t been all that close to the people at work, anyway. Her two best friends had moved: Lauren and her husband were in Atlanta, and Pia’s assignment in Paris had been extended twice.

Joyce was down to her second string, which was unraveling. Missing book group yet again would only add to her funk.

When she walked into Heidi’s living room for the meeting a few nights later, Marie was, indeed, holding forth. Four women were gathered around the blond Danish coffee table, where cups and plates were artfully arranged around an uncut cake. But Marie wasn’t talking about Anna Karenina. For a moment, Joyce wondered if she’d been in an accident; the circles under her eyes were so dark they looked like bruises. But no, it was just the exhaustion, as Marie was explaining, of taking care of a nearly three-year-old with absolutely no interest in using the toilet, while at the same time contending with her teenage twins. “Forty-seven is just too old to be doing this,” she said.

Heidi, a fifty-two-year-old pediatrician married to a shrink, was the oldest member of the group. Joyce, at forty-two, was the youngest member. The rest of them had started when all their kids were in elementary school. Now, Heidi’s oldest was in college, and their occasional non-book-related conversations revealed the changes. A few months back, before Heidi — the group’s schoolmistress-cum-den-mother — could rein them in, there had been a hilarious debate about whether there was a causal relationship between hormone replacement therapy and the exponential increase of VW Beetles in Boston’s western suburbs.

But no one was laughing tonight. In the long pause that followed Marie’s confession, Alice blurted, “I moved out of the house.”

Marie’s mouth dropped open. They could hear a door close upstairs.

“What happened?” asked Heidi, her long, blue caftan swishing around her legs as she sat down next to Alice.

“Nothing happened,” Alice said slowly. “There was nothing left with Tim. It was just . . . empty.”

“What will that do to Petra?” Marie said a little too quickly. Alice winced at Marie’s typical rush to judgment.

“Joint custody.”

The room went silent again.

“I had no idea you were unhappy,” said Joyce, who ha