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window, restlessly drumming her fingers against her stomach. The taut, trembling sensation in her belly would not release, even now, even five hundred miles from the city.
    Pulling the curtain across the dormer, Bean walked back toward her bed, peeling off her clothes. The torn, sticky nylons went into the wastebasket, her suit she laid out on the bed. There was a grease stain on the skirt from a hamburger she had eaten on the road. She’d have to see if Barney had managed to get itself a dry cleaner while she was gone. When she took off her jewelry, a silver bangle watch and tiny diamond earrings, the tight feeling in her stomach welled up again.
    She pulled off her underwear and wrapped a towel around her chest before she walked across the hallway to the bathroom the three of us had always shared. The heavy claw-foot tub still stood there, but with a new shower curtain wrapped around it in a circle. The shampoo she had left here the last time she visited—Thanksgiving? Last summer? Longer?—sat on the windowsill, thank heavens, because she hadn’t had time (or, let’s face it, money) to stop at the salon before she left. She turned the water on, icy cold to take away the sticky heat of the journey, and stepped under its punishing blast, baptismal, praying for the stone inside her to slip down the drain, to disappear.
    Bean hadn’t thought of what she would do now. She’d been so focused on getting out of the city, sure that putting miles between that life and this one would grant her some kind of pardon. Annoyingly, this had proved untrue. In the car were boxes and boxes of clothes—for heaven’s sake, what had she needed all those clothes for?—each one a reminder of what she had done. Thief, she thought as she scrubbed her face. Thou art a robber, a lawbreaker, a villain. What was left of her makeup disappeared into the soap and water, but she kept pushing the washcloth over her face, her skin going raw and red.
    No plan. No past. No future. She was at home, and of course Rose had to be here, too. She who might have been voted Most Likely to Judge You Harshly. Even Cordy, flaky as she was, might have been better. But Rose. Jeez.
    Bean leaned down and shut off the water. She was going to have to solve this, somehow. Find a job. One that wouldn’t require a reference, of course.
    If she could do that, could pay back the firm and get rid of everything she’d bought with that money, maybe she could make a fresh start. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back to New York yet, but another city—San Francisco? Better weather there anyway. There she could forget. There it would all be different.
     
     
     
     
    A t seven o’clock, the sun was finally considering its rest, bringing relief from the heavy heat of the day. In the kitchen, Bean sat on one of the counters, her back pressed up against the yellow wall, her arm hemmed in by the cabinets on one side. She hulled strawberries, as many going into her mouth as the bowl, it seemed, her fingers sticky with juice. The heavy ceramic bowl had come from our Nana, and it made Bean miss her.
    Our mother stood in front of the sink, her fingers deftly flicking over a cucumber, peeling it with a knife, a skill none of us has ever mastered without risking serious bodily injury. She is a tremendous cook, but a notoriously unreliable one. If our mother is responsible, dinner is rarely served in our house before nine, and we remember, at times when we were young, our parents awakening us to eat, nodding heads drooping toward the table, thin legs in white printed pajamas swinging sleepily like pendulums under the chairs. Our mother is capricious, likely to be struck by a whim to prepare a four-course meal on an ordinary Wednesday, and then struck by equally strong whims to wander off in the middle of that preparation and take a soothing bath, or to pick up the book she had been reading earlier and involve herself in that world for a while until the pasta water boils away