Because Cami and Annie had talked with such enthusiasm about their grandparents' rustic cottage in the Adirondacks, I was unconsciously expecting this house to have that kind of charm, despite its twelve bedrooms. But I was wrong. This house was very big, very formal, and very, very new.

Built from pale stone and cream siding, it was laid out in an L. My house was an L too, but other than that, my little Virginia farmhouse had nothing in common with this chateauesque creation. It had three visible stories, and the interior of the L formed a gravel-covered parking court. Two sides of the court were enclosed by the wings of the house. The remaining two were fortressed by low stone walls. Big stone planters-dish-shaped instead of the conventional urns-sat on top of the wall at careful intervals, and there were two similar planters on either side of the front door. The planters held several varieties of ivy, but, this being November, they looked a little spa.r.s.e.

A two-seater metallic-blue BMW with a couple of big dents in the fenders was carelessly parked in the courtyard, managing to block any car that might be parked in the three-car garage. I pulled in close to one of the stone walls, hoping to stay out of the BMW's line of fire. I felt sure that it wasn't Rose's car. It was much too small to hold her share of the Oregon Trail load of food.

There was a small door near the garage. It was recessed and half hidden beneath an eave. I suspected that it led to the kitchen. I am a kitchen-door person, but since I didn't know who had driven the BMW, I went to the main door. It was ornate, with leaded side windows and a fan light. The doorbell appeared to be part of a correspondingly elaborate intercom system. I pressed the buzzer, and as I waited for a response, I peered through the window, seeing a wide front hall tiled in an icy marble. The walls had little niches for sculptures. All of them were empty.

A clicking emitted from the intercom. I pressed down on the little switch marked Speak, said my name, but got no reply. I tried the door even though the clicking didn't sound as if it had unlocked the door. And it hadn't. The door was locked. I spoke into the intercom again and got some more clicking. Clearly, the person inside didn't know how to work the intercom. I buzzed once more and went back to the side panel to continue my peering.

The stairs were wide and curved elegantly. My guess was that the main part of the house was laid out like a center-hall colonial with the living room on one side of the hall, the dining room on the other, and the kitchen and family room running along the back. Finally I saw the hem of a skirt descending the stairs. I stepped back so as not to be caught peering through the gla.s.s. A minute later, a woman opened the door. It was Jill Allyn Stanley, the novelist, the donor of the oversized espresso machine.

She looked older and more tense than in her photos. Thanks to some more Internet snooping, I now had a sense of her career- lots of early promise that had plateaued into a steady "good enough" kind of success. Wonen's book clubs read her, but she didn't get movie deals or big foreign sales.

"Are you Mariposa?" she asked me.

"Uh, no." She certainly wasn't guilty of ethnic stereotyping. No one had ever before wondered if I was named Mariposa. "I'm Darcy, Jeremy's mother."

"Oh, dear." She seemed to pay no attention to my introduction of myself. She looked even more tense. "Mariposa came two days ago, but I was working and I just couldn't have people cleaning, so I told her to come back today."

"Mariposa is the cleaning lady?"

"Yes. I had forgotten that she always came on Mondays. You don't think she will mind coming back a different day?"

How on earth was I supposed to know that? But it was hard to imagine that in an affluent area like this, the cleaning ladies had lots of free time right before a holiday weekend.

"I really need her to come back because I can't figure out the dishwasher. But maybe she'll come later on." Jill Allyn obviously decided to pursue hope as a strategy. She put her hand on the banister, ready to go back upstairs. "But if you don't have anything else to do right now, could you look at the dishwasher, see if you can get it to work?"

"Is it broken? Do you know where they keep the tools?" Give me a pair of needle-nose pliers and I'll try to fix anything. I frequently can't, but I enjoy trying.

"Tools? Oh, no, no, no. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I just don't know how to work it. And Rose gets her knickers in a twist about people leaving their dishes all over." And with that, she went back upstairs, leaving me standing in the hall by myself.

I had been right about the layout of the house. On my left was what had been intended as a formal living room. It was furnished in more pale colors; it looked like a model home, although it lacked the accessories and the little unifying pots of ivy that had turned my house into such a showplace. The dining room, to my right, had-I counted-twelve chairs around the table and another six against the wall.

Behind the living room was a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls. Only one bank of shelves was full of books; the rest were empty, but there were still boxes and boxes obviously waiting to be unpacked.

Then, as I had suspected, the back of the house was open. The kitchen was at one end and informal eating s.p.a.ce was in the middle; at the far end, a U-shaped arrangement of three pale leather sofas faced a huge flat-panel TV that hung over the fireplace like a painting. The whole s.p.a.ce felt vast and impersonal.

There were several sets of double gla.s.s doors along the back wall. I opened one and went outside. A swimming pool was covered with a carefully fitted tarp. An elaborate outdoor grill had been built into a stone enclosure. A broad lawn extended to a marshy swath of reeds. Beyond those reeds was the ocean. I couldn't see it, but I could hear the steady murmur of wind and waves.

I went back inside, closing out the sound of the ocean. This was a beach house? To me, a summer home ought to be a glorious jumble, candy dishes full of unknown keys and paper clips, garages stuffed with croquet sets and kids' bikes, cabinets full of old board games, their boxes bleached and flattened. There should be a leaking shed with a wooden canoe, a stack of bushel baskets, and a rotary lawn mower. In that mess would be a sense of possibilities, ways to have fun, suggested by generations of other people having fun.

This house did not look as if anyone had ever had fun in it.

I found a very elegant half bath underneath the stairs. It was immaculate, but the roll was out of toilet paper. There wasn't even the empty cardboard tube. Apparently someone-Jill Allyn, no doubt-had taken the whole roll, not caring about the fate of others. Fortunately I had a little packet of Kleenex in my pocket. I washed my hands, dried them on my jeans-there was no towel- and then went into the kitchen to address the dishwasher issue.

Most people, when they can't figure out the controls on a dishwasher panel, discover that after they have loaded the dishes and wrestled with the soap dispenser. Jill Allyn Stanley had apparently had a defeatist att.i.tude from the get-go. She hadn't put a single dish into the dishwasher. The counter was covered with teacups and crumb-studded plates. There were crumbs by the toaster, streaks of dried tomato sauce on the counter near the microwave, and little rectangular tea-colored stains all over. Apparently Jill Allyn drank a lot of tea and always put her used tea bags on the counter before throwing them in the trash . . . although she didn't always put them in the trash. A few sat on the counter, dried and slumped over, looking like desiccated mice.

Although the dishwasher had a variety of options for how and when to wash dishes, it was otherwise perfectly straightforward. I loaded it quickly, found detergent under the sink, and started it. I wiped the counters and closed the cabinet doors.

Although it was a million times bigger, this kitchen reminded me of the various time-share condominiums that Mike and I used to rent for family vacations. Everything was immaculate and impersonal. The dishes were white with a ribbed rim. The water and juice gla.s.ses had a similar ribbed design. The pots and pans were all from one manufacturer; they were still shiny, looking as if they had hardly been used. There were no coffee mugs printed with corporate logos, no fiesta-striped pitcher purchased for a margarita party, no stray serving dish left behind after a neighborhood pot luck.

I had always enjoyed cooking on our family vacations. All four of us would go to the grocery store together. With everyone piling things into the cart, we would have way too much food; at the end of the week, we would line up the uneaten apples and unopened boxes of crackers in hopes that the maids would take them.

I hadn't taken a real vacation since Mike had left. That was something I needed to figure out how to do.

Leading out of Rose and Guy's ma.s.sive kitchen was a hallway that led to the garage and the door I had noticed earlier. As I went down it, I snooped. To my immediate left was a big pantry with a second refrigerator. Across from that was a built-in desk with a computer monitor and a.s.sorted devices that provided music, security, and internal communications. Recessed storage cupboards lined the desk side of the hall, while beyond the pantry was a back staircase, followed by another half bath, less elegant than its front-hall sister but possessing a full roll of toilet paper. The hall ended with a door to the garage. At right angles to that was the door to the parking court. Just inside that door were perhaps ten plastic pots of gold-and rust-colored mums. I moved them a bit and then unloaded my car, putting the contents of my cooler in the pantry refrigerator.

I was just finishing when I heard the little door open. I went down the hall to meet Rose. She apologized for not having gotten here before me. "I hope that Jill Allyn was at least mildly welcoming." She sounded as if she thought that there had been no chance of that.

"She thought I was the cleaning lady."

"Jill Allyn thinks everyone is her clean- Wait a minute. Why did she think you were the cleaning lady? Mariposa and her sister come on Mondays. We told Jill Allyn that when she said she wanted to come out early."

I explained about Jill Allyn's sending Mariposa away.

"You aren't serious, are you? The house didn't get cleaned?"

"It looks fine," I tried to say, but Rose wasn't listening. She was angry, and I didn't blame her. She jerked out the keyboard on the house computer, keyed in a code, and spoke into the intercom. "Jill Allyn, I'm here." She was forcing her voice to be pleasant. "Could you come down and move your car so I can unload?"

We both looked at the intercom speaker. There was no answer, not even the bewildered clicks I had heard at the front door.

"I'm not sure she knows how to work the intercom," I volunteered.

"It may be more than that," Rose said darkly. "I'll bet she isn't where she's supposed to be." She tried a different code and spoke the same message. "Do you have friends who are this annoying?" she asked me while we were waiting to see what would happen. A moment later came the futile clicking as Jill Allyn tried to respond.

"No wonder those mums are sitting in the hall," Rose said. "Mariposa was bringing her son, who was going to plant them."

"Rose . . . Rose . . ." Jill Allyn called from the front of the house.

I followed Rose through the kitchen and out to the front hall. Jill Allyn was bending over from the railing. "I'm in the middle of a paragraph. I'll drop my keys down and you can get someone else to move the car."

Her aim was so bad that if I hadn't spent years and years playing catch with my boys, the keys would have ricocheted off the wall, chipping the paint.

"Sorry," she apologized for her bad throw. "Just bring them back up when you're done, okay?"

No, that wasn't okay. "I'll leave them right here." I pointed to one of the empty sculpture niches.

She looked blank for a moment, as if she had never heard of a parking attendant-which apparently I now was-being so uncooperative. "All right," she said and started to move away.

"Wait a minute," Rose called up to her. "Don't go. You need to change rooms. I know that both Guy and Mary Beth told you when you wanted to come out early, that you needed to stay in the room over the garage."

"They said that, but it made no sense." Jill Allyn leaned back over the railing, her hair falling forward. "No one else was here, and I work so well in the front room."

"I understand," Rose acknowledged. She was having to speak with her head tilted back. "But now everyone is coming, so you need to move."

"I know that, and I will. I definitely will." Jill Allyn sounded a bit like Zack when he talked about his college applications. Oh, don't worry. I'll get to them . . . just maybe not today.

Rose picked up on that. "I would appreciate it if you could do it now."

"It doesn't have to be this minute, does it? I'm in the middle of a scene . . . and my stuff's all spread out. So if you need a room this instant, it'd probably be easier for you to rea.s.sign things a bit. I'm just suggesting that because it would be easier for you if you did it that way."

"That's not the issue," Rose said. "We have people coming who have never been here before, and Guy and I would like them to have rooms with views."

"If you're going to bring Guy into it, what do you think he cares about-me finishing this ma.n.u.script or who sleeps where? What's gotten into you?" Jill Allyn's voice was edged with contempt. "You never used to care about things like this."

"Maybe, maybe not. But I would like you to move."

"And I am going to . . . just not this very second. I still have work to do." She emphasized the I as if to say that Rose no longer had work to do. She flicked her hand, dismissing the issue, and then disappeared from the railing. Rose said nothing.

I was astonished, not just at Jill Allyn's phenomenonally bad manners but at the fact that Rose had caved. She had given up, let Jill Allyn have her way.

If Jill Allyn had been a superimportant "offend at your own peril" client, then Rose wouldn't have raised a fuss in the first place. But to take a stand, then back down . . . that didn't fit with the impression that I had of Rose. She'd seemed confident and poised. She'd struck me as reliable and straightforward, qualities that mattered a lot to me. So why had she let herself get into an "I'm more important than you" spitting match, and why had she let Jill Allyn win?

I followed her back into the kitchen. "If this is about me or my dad having that room, we don't care. We really don't."

"I know that," she said with a sigh. "I'm sorry you had to witness that scene, but when it comes to Jill Allyn, I must have some sick inner need to punish myself. I can't think of any other reason why I put up with her. She and I have a long history-we were moms on the playground together-and sometimes it gets ugly like that."

"The way she was talking . . . that sounded like working-mom versus nonworking-mom c.r.a.p. You work at the agency, don't you?"

"No." Her voice was tight. "I haven't really worked since Finney was born."

"Oh."

She turned her back to me and started fiddling with the toaster cord, tucking it behind the appliance. "You have to understand . . . he changed everything for us. He had his first surgery when he was a week old, and then he had a total of four. After he was finally able to start on solid foods, he was a mess until we figured out the corn allergy. Then we had to come out of denial about the fact that his issues weren't only physical. So, no, I haven't been working."

"I wasn't judging you," I said instantly.

"Other people have."

My guys had been healthy-thank G.o.d for that-but I'd seen the toll that a chronically ill child takes on a woman: the nights in the hospitals; the frustrating days of waiting for doctors to return phone calls; the research that never agreed with other research; the anxiety, the depression. It was hard to reconcile what I knew about such women with the glossy magazine article about Rose Zander-Brown who discovered new literary talent at her kitchen table.

Rose probably couldn't reconcile them either. She must have felt like a different person.

"Do you miss working?"

"Not at first. I was too busy and under too much stress. Everything was so complex-there were so many different issues-it all took over my brain. I don't regret the choices I made, not at all. Finney's doing so much better than anyone ever thought he would."

"And you have to give yourself a lot of credit for that."

She nodded. "I know that. But that orientation to the world, that practical, problem-solving, list-making, completely left-brain stuff, has spread. Like with this house, I didn't want to come out here and have to do more housework than I do in Brooklyn. We were supposed to have someone living here all the time and so on weekends we would just walk in with however many guests, and dinner would be ready. But Guy also thought that it would be a great way to support new writers. They could live here rent-free with a small stipend as long as they kept the lightbulbs changed and went to the grocery store before we came."

"That didn't work?"

"Hardly. We bought the place in May, and we've already been through two different caretakers. The first woman was fine when we came out here with a bunch of Annie's friends. But then over the Fourth of July, we had a big party with people we knew professionally-editors and such-and she finally told me that talking to them was more important to her career than helping me in the kitchen. She thought that they wouldn't take her seriously if they saw her as kitchen help. Of course, I wanted to ask her if that meant that no one was taking me seriously, but I didn't want to know the answer to that one. So then we had two young guys-they were a couple-and they were pretty good, but we showed up Labor Day with two other families, and they had done nothing because they were both on deadlines, and couldn't imagine that anyone would think that going to the grocery store for me was more important than their work. And to top it all off, these people go back to the city and tell everyone that I'm a complete b.i.t.c.h. Just exactly what I set out to be in life-the boss's b.i.t.c.hy wife."

The nurses on the OB floor complain about the doctors' b.i.t.c.hy wives, coming in demanding the best rooms because their husbands are on staff. I wouldn't want anyone talking about me that way.

"How does Jill Allyn fit into this?" I asked. "She's the important, moneymaking client and you're the freeloading wife?" Some nurses pay way too much attention to what cars the doctors' wives drive and what jewelry they wear.

"That's what Jill Allyn would say," Rose agreed, "except when she needs to be my dearest friend. In the old days, she was our most important client. When we started the agency, we used to pride ourselves on taking ma.n.u.scripts that no one else knew what to do with and making them work. Money was only one of the ways of gauging how you were doing, and we usually pretended that it was the least important. Then Finney came, and Guy felt powerless. The one thing Guy could do was make sure we provided for Finney. Making money started to count a lot. We-he- took on a different kind of a client. I'd been the one with the eye for the quirky, literary project that would get great reviews; he could spot the one that would get a movie deal. He turned out to thrive in a higher-stakes world, not just in the publishing deals but also in our own investments, so even after Finney's trust was set up, he kept going, and now we have this." She waved her hand around the marble foyer.

"So Jill Allyn's not as important as she used to be?"

Rose gave her head a slight shake. Her auburn hair swung around her neck. Her earrings were gold, but nothing fancy. "We've got some authors with seven-figure deals, and she's not one of them. In her heart, she knows that, so she uses the friendship to make herself seem important. She works it from both ends. She invites herself out here because she's our dear friend, our neighbor back in Park Slope, and then she won't change rooms out here because she's a client facing a deadline."

"Let's forget about her and get to work."

Rose had been leaning against the counter. She straightened, ready to get on with things. "But how," she asked lightly, "am I to forget about the fact that we wouldn't be working at all if Jill Allyn hadn't dismissed the cleaning lady?"

The house was, in fact, quite clean. Apparently Mariposa and her sister came out for a full day every Monday whether or not the Zander-Browns had come the preceding weekend.

I moved Jill Allyn's car. Rose pulled hers into the garage and we unloaded quickly. Then Rose took me up the back stairs to the room over the garage where I would be staying, now that Jill Allyn was squatting in the room originally intended for me.

It was a big, bright s.p.a.ce, but the view to the front was of the road. The windows on one side looked down on the parking court. The other side faced the construction project next door. Furthermore, the dormers, necessary to the house's external grandeur, left the room cut up and difficult to furnish. There was no unbroken wall for the bed, so it was angled into a corner, protruding awkwardly.

"The people who built this house fired their architect and their first builder," Rose explained. "The second builder tinkered with the plans, and this is one of the results."

"Other people lived here? It seems so new."

"They never moved in. They split up two weeks before they were supposed to. We saved a ton of money, and they had already chosen all the furniture, so we could move right in."

"So you didn't choose any of the furniture downstairs?"

"G.o.d, no. I can't stand all those noncolors. I keep meaning to do something with the place, but once I get out here, I never seem to have the time."

Rose turned back the coverlet on the bed. Seeing that there were no sheets on it, she crossed the room to get a set from the closet. "I should make Jill Allyn do this."

"It's just making beds," I said. I had already stripped off the coverlet. "It's no big deal."

There are women who take care of their homes because they love the results-the peaceful, orderly rooms, the fragrance of home cooking. Not me. I like the process. I like the moving, the stretching, the lifting involved in housework. I don't care too much about what my house looks like; my kitchen is always clean and my beds are always made because I don't like to sit still.

But Rose got satisfaction from neither the process nor the result.

I'm not the most spiritual person on the face of the earth, but like most people who work in hospitals, I believe in inst.i.tutions- schools, Boy Scouts, swim teams, the March of Dimes, organized religion. When I was pregnant with Jeremy, Mike and I joined a church and started hauling ourselves there every Sunday. I frequently volunteered to teach one of the youth Sunday school cla.s.ses. As a result of that, I knew my Bible stories, one of which was the Mary and Martha story.

Mary and Martha were a pair of sisters. Jesus and his followers came to their house. Martha set to work, preparing the food and doing whatever else was the New Testament equivalent of planting the mums and changing the sheets. Mary listened to Jesus preach. Martha appealed to Jesus, saying that she needed Mary's help. Jesus came down on Mary's side, saying that Martha was fretting too much.

I don't know what Martha was expecting in appealing to Jesus for support. Men always pretend that housework isn't important. But other than that, I had complete sympathy for her. If you divide the world into Marys and Marthas, I'm an off-the-charts Martha. I'm a doer, not a thinker. Given a choice between sitting at someone's feet listening to theology and being in the kitchen peeling carrots, I'd probably skip the chance to hear the Only Begotten Son and put myself on vegetable duty instead.

But Rose was a Mary, an intellectual, a scholar. Finney's birth had made her a Martha . . . and any decent woman would have done that for her child-but somehow the Martha-ness had taken over every aspect of her life, and here she was making beds while Jill Allyn wouldn't come out of Mary-dom long enough to move her car.

We finished the bed. I checked the bathroom for towels and toilet paper. It had both, but the lightbulb was out.

"The new ones are in the pantry," Rose said, "but let's do your dad's room first. It may need lightbulbs too."

There were three more bedrooms on this level, all of them facing the back of the house. Jill Allyn's corner room was over the kitchen; the master suite, which took up nearly half the floor s.p.a.ce, was at the opposite end. Both of those doors were closed. Between them was the room for my father. Although less than a third of the size of the room over the garage, it had its own small balcony, a big, comfortable reading chair, and a view of the ocean. From these rooms you could see past the reeds and marsh and over a small bay to the ocean and its endless waves. I could see why other people would want a view like that, but I'm a midwesterner. I'd rather look at a plowed field or an orchard of blossoming fruit trees.

There were lightbulbs, towels, and toilet paper in Dad's room, but no soap or wash cloths.