Read The Four Ms. Bradwells for Free Online

maybe not; maybe that’s just me remembering how Ginger used to be. “Tundra swans,” she says. “Coming from Alaska for the winter, like Mia’s mom.”
    I blink up at the birds: their long, graceful necks, their widespread wings. This is the way all the Ms. Bradwells imagine my mom even still. Maybe I’ve told them about the summer the car overheated in Death Valley, the many flat tires on the many roads to nowhere, the dusty pavement through the grimy car window always slipping over the horizon, always leading home again at the end of August, just in time for school. Or maybe I haven’t ever told the Ms. Bradwells any of that; I don’t even know anymore. But I know they hold this unreasonably glamorous image of my mother: in a convertible with the top down, a scarf blowing behind her like Beryl Markham in her airplane as we set out from Chicago to Alaska, me in the passenger seat, my brother, Bobby, in the back, Dad calling, “Drive carefully, Ellen!” as we leave him behind with three months of frozen dinners and a lonely trek back and forth to the office every day. Except the Ms. Bradwells don’t see Dad, they only see Mom. She has Alzheimer’s now, Mom does. She refers to Dad as “that nice man who takes care of me.” Ginger and Laney and Betts would be appalled at how unswanlike her thin neck looks, how frail.
    Betts frowns at her cellphone, then asks to see mine. I flip it open but have no reception either. We’re too far out on the water.
    “Remind me to call Isabelle when we get to the island,” she says.
    I’m godmother to all the Baby Girl Bradwells: Izzy, who is in law school herself now, and Ginger’s Annie and Laney’s Gem, freshmen atPrinceton and Stanford. Half the reason I came back from Madagascar was to see Iz and Annie in New York this weekend. But an express train from Princeton or New Haven to Manhattan for a dinner is one thing; a train to a car to a boat to Cook Island would be nearly as ridiculous a trip as Gem flying to New York from Palo Alto for the evening. Ginger left Annie a message while she and Laney got the car, telling her daughter not to come.
    “What’s with that camera, Mi?” Laney asks. “It looks like the kind of thing only you could love.”
    “Like Dartmouth!” Betts suggests.
    “But we all loved Andy,” Laney protests. “Maybe he wasn’t such a good husband choice for Mia, but …”
    The Law Quadrangle note Andy and I submitted the spring we married:
Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) and Andrew (“Dartmouth”) Cooper IV (JD ’82) were married in Chicago, and will be making their home together in San Francisco. The former Ms . Porter has taken the name Mary Porter Cooper in defiance of the wishes of her friend Ms . Ginger Conrad (JD ’82), who has vowed hereinafter to refer to all future issue of the couple as “the Babies Terrorist-Bradwell.”
    It had seemed so funny at the time, that whole name business, Ginger insisting Andy should become a Porter rather than me taking his name. (“Porter-Cooper?” Betts had suggested. “Cooper-Porter? I know! Coopporter! You can start a business transporting chicken coops!”) But I’d gladly tucked Porter aside and abandoned Ellen altogether, shrugging off my mom’s name and all her expectations for me with it, claiming the person I was rather than abandoning any part of me. After six months of wedded unbliss, though, Andy started coming home far too late at night—which might have been work or might have been another woman but wasn’t either. We split after less than a year, and I took the apartment and I took my name back, and he quietly moved into his new lover’s house in Pacific Heights.
    “So,” I say, hoping the film isn’t scratching as I turn the plastic knob to advance it, seeing that even Laney’s neck is starting to go. I position the wrinkling skin under her jaw in the center of the plastic lens, where the focus is sharpest. She’s too close, though, and the Holga is just