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movie. Mama fell down the stairs? All of them?” Maisy pictured their front curving staircase, the same one she had come down every morning of her life, for school, for dates, for cotillion dances.
    “Yes,” Riley answered. “All of them.”
    “Drunk?”
    Riley’s silence was the only reply.
    “Was she drunk, Riley?” Maisy repeated.
    “Probably. But that isn’t the point.”
    “What is?”
    “She broke her left femur, and two ribs, and sprained her right wrist.”
    “I thought you said she was okay.” Out of the dark corner of her mind, Maisy felt something move toward her sight, some vague and dark inevitability from which she wanted to run as fast and as far as possible.
    “When I said she was okay, I meant she wasn’t . . .”
    “Dead,” Maisy said.
    “You are so crass. She’s going to be home, but laid up. . . .”
    “No way.”
    “You don’t even know what I’m going to say yet.”
    Maisy closed her eyes. “Yes, I do. You’re gonna say I have to come earlier. Stay longer.”
    “Yes, you have to come home.”
    “No.” Maisy opened her eyes, picked up a wrinkled swatch of fabric and folded it into a neat square. “I’ll help you if I can from here, but I can’t stay longer than the weekend. I have a job . . . friends, a life.”
    “Your family needs you. You know the store won’t make it if this week’s events don’t bring in enough . . . money. It will all be gone. You know that.”
    “Don’t pull the family card on me. I don’t remember anyone coming out here to help me. I don’t see any Sheffields in Laguna Beach with Maisy.”
    “You left.”
    “Yes, I did. And I’m staying. What can I do to help?”
    “Take an early plane. Leave your return ticket open-ended.” Riley’s voice cracked with the strain of rare tears. “Please.”
    “No,” Maisy said again, realizing her answer sounded like a watered-down version of her no of only five seconds ago. She knew how this would go—the negative response would become so weak and insipid that soon it would turn into a maybe , then a yes. She had to hang up before that happened.
    Riley’s voice strengthened. “I need . . . We need you.”
    “I was only gonna fly in for the party, fly out. The end. I swear, no one but Mama could have figured out how to coincide her seventieth birthday with the anniversary of a two-hundred-year-old house. And now this.”
    “Stop it.”
    “Can’t you call Adalee and get her to help?”
    “I will as soon as I hang up with you.”
    Static silence on the line sounded like the incoming tide, the filling of the marsh, the cicadas on the back porch, and the rising song of the seagull on a summer night. “No,” Maisy repeated. “I can’t.” She shoved aside her ingrained good manners and hung up on her sister.
    Sheila poked her head in the back room. “Everything okay?”
    “Just a little Southern family drama.”
    Sheila laughed. “Don’t go thinkin’ that drama is only reserved for the South.” Her fake Southern accent made Maisy laugh.
    “My drunk mama fell down the stairs, broke her leg and other assorted bones. My uptight sister wants me to come home now and help her.”
    Sheila’s smile dropped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost my mother two years ago. You do know you have to go, right?”
    “Not you, too.”
    Sheila smiled. “We can do without you—but not for very long.”
    Maisy sank into a down-cushioned chair and dropped her face into her hands. She exhaled into the truth: she had to go home to Georgia.

THREE
    RILEY
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Riley leaned against her desk with the cell phone pressed to her ear. Night settled around the closed bookstore, blending the shadows into darkness. Adalee had ignored Riley’s last four phone calls; finally she answered.
    “Hey, sis. What’s up?” Loud voices echoed in the background.
    “I’ve been trying to call you all evening,” Riley said in a light voice, attempting to hide her frustration.
    “I know. I’ve been