The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton

job teaching back at Michigan Law. I still remember how fraudulent I’d felt standing to lecture in the same room I’d taken exams in just a few years before. But teaching seemed the job best suited to my daughter’s needs. We try so hard to make our children safe. But we never know where the dangers lie.
    Yet you have to wonder who tried to take care of whom at Chawterley. Sissies’ Square and Baby’s Room and the Nursery are all here on the guest side of the house. Far from the family wing from which Ginger emerges, finally.
    She’s dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt like her mother wore everywhere. Her feet are bare. The wide expanse of her manicured toes presses against the dark wood floor.
    “Well,” she says. “Food? And then maybe a game of Scrabble?” Scrabble: a game Ginger used to play to the death.
    The front doorbell rings. The same can-the-press-have-found-us-already surprise registers on each of our faces. Ginger slinks barefooted toward the back stairs. Mia, Laney, and I slip off our shoes and skulk along behind her. We cross the sheathed-furniture Sun Room. The kitchen. The serving pantry. The outside end of the Dining Hall.
    The damask drapes of the Front Parlor are drawn. Ginger peeks through the center gap. “Shit!” she says in a tone that renders obvious the absence of reporter-wolves at our door.
    She hurries to the front foyer. Throws open the door. Calls loudly, “Max!”
    An electric car slips soundlessly onto the one-lane road. A red fireball of setting sun takes its place at the end of the drive.
    Three tan reusable grocery sacks with a tree-and-mountain logo sit outside the door. A substantial pile of firewood is topped with a note that there is more outside Faith’s Library. I choke up as I realize this is the way the new library will be forever known. Faith’s Library.
    I wonder if any of us ever imagined that Hamlet actually slept at some little boy’s feet. That he was a puppy. A young dog. An old and faithful companion. An emptiness at the end of a bed.
    I think of Matka as we watch the sun set. I still sometimes pick up the phone to call her about some song I’ve worked out on the zhaleika. I imagine Izzy hunched over a casebook at Yale. As sure of herself as Faith ever was.
    The last blink of sunlight sinks into the water. A rainbow swirl of color graces the horizon.
    “Diem perdidi,” Laney says. “I have lost the day.”
    “ ‘And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?’ ” Ginger’s wide mouth registers a hint of self-satisfaction as she picks up a grocery sack. Does she think she’s just one-upped Laney? Like that night in the hot tub when she’d answered Laney’s Latin with the Dracula quote. Latin that was literary, too. I see this so often with my students: the need to be the smartest. But I’ve always imagined Laney and Ginger are closer than that. I thought after they both failed to make law review they’d settled into a more intimate friendship. Left the competition to Mia and me. For years I’ve envied a closeness that perhaps never was.
    Laney and I lift the two other sacks as Mia stares out the door with her hopeful-toddler look. Eyes the brown of a paper bag but not so plain. Surely Max reminds Mia of Andy. He seems so like Mia’s ex to me. Like the kind of guy who might understand her weird mix of confidence and insecurity. Her fear that anyone she loves will leave the way her mother left her father again and again. Without ever letting him go.
    Mia wants to follow Max. But she just stands there. She watches in the rearview mirror as everything she wants slips away.
    There is no room for romance this weekend anyway. We’re in a tight spot. And Mia is the one who more often than not leads us out of tight spots.
    Back in the kitchen, Ginger flips on the lights. Opens the refrigerator. Stares, pale-eyed and taken aback. The refrigerator is spotless inside. Completely empty. If Ginger didn’t do this then who came in