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her!”
    “Seriously, Maggie, I didn’t need my husband’s permission. That’s ridiculous!”
    “Well, I’ll keep an eye on him,” Maggie said. “All those cute young nurses! Woo hoo!”
    “Oh, thanks a lot,” Susan said.
    Maggie took some measure of delight in making her sister insecure, but Susan knew it and after all these years, she had learned to take it in stride.
    Beth had finished all the napkins and suddenly couldn’t hold her eyes open.
    “I’m going to catch a nap for a few minutes,” Beth said.
    “You go on, darlin’,” Maggie said. “Thanks for all your help.”
    Susan followed her to the foot of the steps and then gave her a hug.
    “I’m glad you’re home, baby,” she said. “I always miss you.”
    “Me too, Momma. Call me if I sleep more than an hour, okay?”
    “Sure,” she said, and kissed her on her forehead.
    Beth climbed the stairs envisioning the laughing faces of her relatives. Her mind had time-traveled to the next week and she could already feel them there. She became giddy thinking of the endless teasing that would go on, the advice that would be freely dispensed from their generation to hers. She knew how it would be. Their voices would be a continuous hum like a swarm of honeybees around a hive. White breezes from the Atlantic would drench the rooms in something sweet and delicious. Thousands of memories would be whispered to them from inside the weathered boards of pine. And they would move around one another like tiny planets in their own elliptically shaped orbits, revolving and revolving.
    She was so tired. Her legs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. She reached her room and could barely open the door. Beth did not remember having turned down her bed or that she had put Lola in her crate, where she snored in tiny puffs. But there were the facts. She could not recall lowering the blinds and positioning the slats just so, so that the air could sweep in and around the room cooling everything off, with the rising tide playing its age-old lullaby. It was all a welcome mystery, typical of the things that happened there. She pulled off her jeans, dropped them to the floor, and slipped between the crisp white sheets. Pale fragrances of mint and jasmine escaped from the pillows, lulling her into dreams of what? She did not know. Someone was there; she could feel them, there in the room with her. A faint presence. She was too tired to open her eyes or to ask who it was. It did not matter. She did not care. She smiled to herself knowing she had already been sized up, the rules of engagement were being laid forth, and the games were about to begin.

2
    Bon Voyage
    B Y FRIDAY, THE house was loud, bulging with bodies, excited voices, and there wasn’t a vacant bed or chair. Beth’s aunts Sophie and Allison had yet to arrive but all the others were in various stages of getting settled. Everyone wanted to spend the weekend in the bedrooms of their childhood, but that was, of course, impossible.
    On the flip of a quarter, Uncle Henry and Aunt Paula, affectionately known as Teensy, were enthroned in Uncle Henry’s old room, which did not measure up to Teensy’s highfalutin standards at all.
    “There are mosquitoes in here, Henry. Do you hear me? Nasty!” she complained in her often-imitated shrill juvenile voice from behind their closed door.
    “Shut your damn mouth,” Beth heard her Uncle Henry say. “The whole world will hear you.”
    But they were staying there anyway because everyone knew that Uncle Henry was tighter than a mole’s ear and wouldn’t waste money on a hotel if he didn’t have to, which was probably one reason why he had so much money in the bank. As a boy, he had shared that room with Uncle Timmy. Uncle Timmy and Aunt Mary Jo had decided to sleep in the twins’ old room, downstairs with two of their four kids in the next bedroom, on creaking rollaway beds that were older than Beth. Maggie and Grant were staying in her grandmother’s old room, and her