This dress was soft and flowing.

She didn't wanted something all heavy and beaded, but she didn't want something superplain either.

This dress looked as if it didn't have any embellishments, but when Rose enlarged the picture, we saw tiny seed pearls and insets of narrow satin ribbon.

And, above all, she didn't wanted a super-Cinderella fairy-princess gown.

Except that she did want that.

Cami was young, just two years out of her teens, and she wanted to look like a princess on her wedding day. But as a literate, ambitious young woman, she knew that she was supposed to think that a princess fantasy was absurdly girlish.

This dress, with its swirling layers, combined the restrained elegance of a Grecian G.o.ddess with billowy romanticism.

"What do we have here?" It was Guy. He put one hand on my shoulder and one hand on Annie's to look at the screen. "Now that's one good-looking dress."

"Do you like it, Dad?" Cami asked eagerly. "Do you really?"

Annie and I moved aside so that he could get a closer look. Then there was a lot of back and forth, Cami asking her parents if they liked the dress, if they really liked it, while Guy and Rose tried to be supportive and encouraging without making the actual decision.

"It does have the same neckline as my prom dress. I liked that so much." Cami bit her lip. She was making up her mind. Then her features started to blur. She was about to cry. "Oh, Mom, Dad . . . I think I love it. No, I know I do."

When Cami had brought her laptop into the kitchen, she'd been hesitant. She'd suspected that this was the dress she wanted, but she'd been unable to trust her first impression. Now that she had made up her mind, she would never look back.

This was probably how she had fallen in love with Jeremy. She would have been cautious at first, suspicious of her strong attraction. Then suddenly one day, a day that was no different from the day before, she would have been flooded with absolute certainty that he was the one. Just as she would never stop loving this dress, she would never stop loving my son.

Guy went back to his chair while Rose and Cami made plans to see the actual dress. Annie was at the table, lining up the papers and brochures that we had shoveled aside for lunch. Her back was to us; I couldn't read her expression, but it didn't seem like her to be organizing other people's papers.

I went over to help.

"That dress was perfect, wasn't it?" Annie said after a moment; she didn't sound happy.

"I don't know much about fashion, but Cami seems to love it."

"Claudia asked her what she wanted, and I guess Cami could only come up with what she didn't want. So Claudia asked me."

"And you told her?"

She nodded. "That was exactly the neckline I described. I've been borrowing Cami's clothes for years. I know what she likes. I'm not saying that Mom and Cami and I could have found a dress that good, but . . . I don't know."

"You were looking forward to all of you going out together."

"Mom had already talked to me about how I was going to need to help Cami make up her mind. As Dad says, her decision tree can get pretty twisted."

Annie felt cheated. She had wanted to go shopping for the wedding dress.

Did Annie want more of a relationship with Cami than she had? Wednesday night, Annie hadn't wanted to play flashlight tag, but had changed her mind the minute Cami had urged her to. Annie was also the one who kept recommending that the wedding have a cottage-garden theme. Cottage gardens are cozy and intimate. Had she been looking forward to the appointments on Monday and Tuesday because it would be something that she, her sister, and her mother-just the three of them-would be doing together?

If so, Claudia had robbed her of that.

A family is a system, Claudia, full of equal and opposite reactions. You can't fix a problem in one spot without creating one somewhere else.

Yes, Cami had needed to find a wedding dress, but Annie had needed to be a part of the finding. And what was more important, the perfect dress or the relationship between two sisters?

But finding the dress did make the afternoon much more productive. Cami was now able to imagine herself walking down the aisle surrounded by an English country garden. This made her able to choose a florist. She didn't select the actual flowers, but at least the wedding was on someone's schedule. That was a start.

Even in absentia, Claudia, clearly a Martha Stewart kind of Martha, continued to help. Cami e-mailed her to gush about the dress. Claudia instantly replied with an e-mail so lengthy that she had to have already written it.

"She says that if we're going to go with different shades of camellias," Cami summarized the e-mail, "there are lots of ways to keep pink from being overly sweet."

"So is she saying that the bridesmaids should wear pink?" Annie asked. Cami was having five bridesmaids, with Annie as the maid of honor. "I look horrible in pink."

"She says that . . . well, not quite that. *Annie might not want to wear pink,' " Cami read, " *but she will look lovely in a very pale sage.' "

"That's true," Annie agreed. "I do."

So we were on track, and when our little train started to derail over the stationery order, Rose had Cami read off Claudia's cell-phone number from the bottom of an e-mail. Rose called her, and, from Mike's mother's house, Claudia a.s.sured us that very pale blush paper, almost a warm ivory, with the embossed camellia was wonderful especially if we used a faded chocolate ink. The mocha we had been considering would be too contemporary.

She gave us a brand.

Guy was back in his chair, still reading the ma.n.u.scripts. Something was different about the one he had now. He was much farther into it than any of the others, and he was ma.s.saging his forehead with the forefinger of his left hand.

Rose finished talking to Claudia and was filling out a form, double checking with Cami each time she made an entry.

Guy was still reading that same ma.n.u.script. He was frowning, but still reading.

"Okay, I think that's done," Rose said with relief. "The printer will go with the Edwardian Script font."

"Don't forget to tell the calligrapher to use that number fifty-seven ink," Annie said.

"Oh, yes. Thanks for reminding me." Rose made a note. "Okay, now for the-"

"Rose," Guy spoke up for the other side of the room, "do you think you could take a look at this ma.n.u.script? One of the new kids in the office was going to turn it down, and I'm inclined to agree, but there's something in it that keeps me reading. Maybe you'll have a notion of what we could do with it."

"I'll be glad to take a look at," Rose answered. "Not today, of course. Or even Monday or Tuesday. It won't be until the end of the week."

"That would be fine," he said.

She went back to proofreading the form for the printer. Guy watched her for a moment. Then, the realist that he was, he dropped the ma.n.u.script into the recycling bin, scrawling another no across the cover letter so that one of his a.s.sistants could send a form rejection.

This was all wrong.

I wanted to stand up and scream, sweeping all those glossy brochures off the table, Stop this, Rose. Stop it this minute. Hire a wedding planner. This isn't what you should be doing. You should be reading that ma.n.u.script, figuring out what's wrong and how to make it right.

What was going on? Finney was settled at a good school; he had good doctors, good therapists. This could have been the year for Rose to figure out what to do with herself. Instead, she was filling out order forms and choosing port-a-potties. Why?

When I had received my first note from her, I'd had an intuition that there was going to be trouble in this for me. I'd stopped thinking that way. I liked Rose so much, I couldn't imagine how she could ever harm me. But my instinct might have been right. Rose was unhappy, and unhappy people are trouble.

Seven.

I.

was now curious about Rose's family's cottage in the Adirondacks. Annie, in particular, spoke of it with longing.

Friday evening, Dad, Guy, and I were outside, getting the big grill ready so that we could barbecue hot dogs and steaks. While we were waiting for the flames from the piped-in gas to heat the artificial briquettes, I asked Guy about the cottage.

"That is a source of regret," he said. "Maybe if we'd handled things differently we'd be up there now, wrestling with charcoal and lighter fluid. It was a low-tech place."

It had, he told us, been in Rose's family for several generations, having been built as a summer home. Wide porches faced a sloping green lawn and the family's extensive stretch of lakefront. Three years ago Rose's parents had died within a few months of each other, leaving the house to their children: Rose, the oldest; Jack, the only son; Holly, the youngest.

"The three of them loved the place," Guy said, "but it was falling apart. It needed a new roof, the foundation had a ton of cracks, and it wasn't winterized."

The three siblings could not agree on which repairs to make first. Living in Albany, Holly wanted it winterized so that she and her family could use it on weekends all year. Jack cared only about its being available for summer use, but he wanted to upgrade the boathouse, something no one else cared about. "Rose and I were willing to invest both in winterizing the house and upgrading the boathouse, but as little as I know about houses, I thought we ought to do the basics first, replacing the roof, repairing the windows, that sort of thing."

"I do know something about houses," Dad said, "and you were right."

"I figure I was," Guy said. "But then it turned out that Holly and Jack couldn't afford to do any of it, and I wasn't going to bear all the costs without some change in the ownership structure. Maybe I was wrong, but the money wasn't trivial. It would have been cheaper to have torn the old house down and started over."

Holly would not consider Guy's plan. If the cottage belonged to Rose, was Holly going to have to ask permission to go to a place that she had been going to her entire life?

"She would only let us have a controlling interest in the property if the contract allowed her and her family to come and go as they pleased. But by then Rose and I had an agenda. We want Finney to be able to live independently someday, and Park Slope probably will be the best place, but the cottage was another option. The village was within walking distance, and there are decent enough services. But for that to be a viable alternative, we couldn't agree to anything that would compromise his right to be there whenever it suited him."

To fund the repairs, Rose's brother had arranged to sell a section of the lakefront. After living through one summer of very noisy, disruptive construction, the family found the following year that the ma.s.sive new house blocked far more of their view than they had antic.i.p.ated. Furthermore, the new house was frequently rented to large multifamily groups who blocked the shared driveway and trespa.s.sed onto the remaining property in order to use the family's private dock.

"All those strangers scared Finney. It was strange because he sees strangers in Park Slope all the time, but he didn't want to go down to the dock even with Rose. Holly and Jack were then willing to have us buy them out, but we didn't want the place either. It was sold a year ago, and we bought out here last spring. I suspect Rose sometimes wishes we'd given in to her sister, but it wouldn't have ended there. If anything had ever not gone Holly's way, she would have blamed Rose entirely."

"Oh, are you talking about Aunt Holly?" Annie was coming out from the shadow just outside the french doors leading back into the house. "And, no, Dad, I haven't been here forever eavesdropping."

"What did you hear, Miss Queenie?" Guy lifted his arm, and Annie, who didn't have a coat on, huddled close to him.

"Just that Aunt Holly blames Mom and only Mom, but I didn't hear for what. Are you going to tell me?"

"Probably not," Guy said evenly.

"Is it about having to sell the cottage or about taking advantage of Grandma Lily?"

"Whoa!" Guy stepped back and turned to face her. "What's this about your grandmother? Mom never took advantage of her. Anything Grandma Lily did, she did willingly."

"Oh, I know that, but Aunt Holly acted like Mom was guilty of elder abuse." Annie glanced at Dad and me. "I did used to do my share of eavesdropping," she said cheerfully, "so I do know a few things I'm not supposed to."

A few was probably a ma.s.sive understatement.

"Then perhaps we shouldn't know it either," Dad said. "It looks like this grill is ready."

I love my father, I really do, but not listen to this? I wanted to hear the story.

Fortunately, Guy had already started to tell it. He'd wanted to defend Rose. "When Finney was little, the one person Rose completely trusted to take care of him was her mother. I think she trusted Lily more than she trusted me."

"I understand that," I said, nodding. "If one of our boys had been chronically ill, I probably would have trusted my mother more than anyone else."

"More than me?" Dad asked in surprise.

"Yes. More than you, Dr. Bow-wow. You might be a loving and experienced pediatrician, but she was my mother."

Dad thought for a moment. "You may be right. I would have relied on my own judgment. Your mother would have done exactly what you had asked her to do even if she thought you were being too cautious."

"Or too controlling," Annie put in. "That's what Mom has to hear, that she's too controlling."

"And I thought you were going to pretend that you didn't eavesdrop anymore." Guy clamped his hand lightly over her mouth and then continued to talk to Dad and me. "For a couple of years, Lily and John-Rose's parents-kept Finney at the cottage for a week in July and a week in August, which meant that we could do things with Cami and Annie that wouldn't have been possible if he'd been with us. We tried to remember that they needed us too."

Annie slipped free of her father's arm. "But Grandma and Grandpa were exhausted when the week was over, and they didn't want to spend their whole summer running a summer camp, so Aunt Holly claimed they were playing favorites, that they were doing more for Mom than for her. I suppose that was true, but it seems to me that Mom needed more than anyone else."

"It sounds as if," my father said, "your aunt is a cla.s.sic younger sibling who never thinks she's getting her fair share."

"Then she should have taken Mom's clothes more often," Annie said. "That's what I did. I was always wearing Cami's clothes and swiping her makeup, and now I like her just fine."

We went in to get the steaks. Rose was on one of the pale leather sofas, playing a reading game with Finney. He picked up a card, then pushed it away with a jerk. His shoulders were hunched forward. He was getting frustrated.

And Rose looked very tired.

When Mike had moved out, I felt as if there was a big orange traffic sign around my neck that read ABANDONED AND BETRAYED. Rose had no outward signs of a person abandoned. She was still married; she had people clamoring to be guests in her home. But her close friends had thought she was obsessed with Finney; the would-be writers who had once valued her opinion had lost interest in her; her sister was angry with her. Her mother, the one person she had trusted completely, had died.

She might not be wearing that big orange traffic sign where the whole world could see it, but it was around here somewhere.

Z.

ack and I were leaving after dinner on Sat.u.r.day night, wanting to avoid the Sunday-after-Thanksgiving traffic. When we were ready to go, Rose and Guy walked out to the car with us. All the outdoor lights were on, and the flagstone parking court was bright.

"Do you have Christmas plans?" Rose asked. "My sister is supposed to come, but we'll still have plenty of room if you can join us."

"Thanks, but the boys and I are going skiing in Colorado with Dad and my brother's family." We had made these plans last spring before Cami and Jeremy had gotten engaged.

"What about New Year's? Will you be in Colorado for the whole holiday? Would you like to come here for New Year's?"

I could feel myself drawing back. This invitation seemed a little too urgent, a little too intense. Did Rose see me as her chance to have a friend again, a sister?

Other women had needed me. I was certified to drive one of the motorboats in the crew-team regattas; I could be counted on to stop a Cub Scout's spurting blood; when the Teacher Appreciation Luncheon Committee wanted entrees that didn't need to be refrigerated or reheated, they knew I could come up with something great.

Until my mother's last illness, I hadn't seen the difference between people needing me and needing the things I could do. But my mother hadn't wanted me because I was a nurse and knew my way around a hospital. She had wanted me at her bedside because I was me, her daughter.

And now that she was gone, I probably did want someone to want me that way again. Rose wanted something; I wanted something. Maybe it was the same thing.

"It's sounds like fun. I'll try to make it work," I promised. "I really will."