The girls looked between each other.

Grandma chose to sip her coffee and hum quietly to herself. She sipped again. “Very good, Louise,” she said, looking right at Charley. “It’s strong and sweet.” She sipped some more, hummed some more.

“Grandma, why did you hate the lake house? It was the finest lake house here,” Meg asked.

“Well,” she said, putting down her cup. “I don’t have any proof of this, but the lake house idea came at the same time as a new court reporter. She was a very buxom blonde. The judge thought sending me and the girls to the lake for the summer was a good idea.” She shook her head. “He was always unfaithful. Always. But he didn’t hit me after that first year. Because my father would have killed him. My father wasn’t in the mob in Chicago but he wasn’t opposed to doing business with them. They had a thing about justice. I think the only man the judge was ever afraid of was my father.”

“Jesus,” Charley said. “You should write an autobiography!”

“You’ll never know how much of it is fiction,” Lou whispered.

“I heard that! You calling me a liar?”

“Tell them about your betrothal and wedding, Mother,” Jo said.

Grandma Berkey smacked her lips and began a story of society parties, bridal showers, bridesmaids, 1950s fashion, pastel gowns, flowers and champagne. She wanted Bobby Darin to sing at the reception but that didn’t work out. The wedding and reception was attended by three hundred, they honeymooned in Miami Beach and her mother met her at her new house in Saint Paul to help her get organized. There were friends of friends who lived in Saint Paul to call on and the right country club had to be found.

Meanwhile, Robert Leonard Berkey, later known only as the judge, was ten years her senior and a junior lawyer in the prosecutor’s office. If not for Grandma’s money, he wouldn’t have been able to so much as take her out to a nice dinner. But thanks to generous campaign contributions from her family to key politicians in Saint Paul, Robert’s rise was pretty quick. Grandma had women friends who were also newly wed; their children came along. She was endlessly busy with social events. Her schedule was packed! And she had a very well-trained household staff. Only four, but they were good. There was the nanny, the cook, the housekeeper, the maid.

“We were so busy,” she said, laughing. “We had such a good time.”

“It sounds like you were happy,” Krista said.

“There were happy times,” she said, sipping her coffee again.

“So marriage to the judge had its positive side?” Krista asked.

“That old buzzard?” she asked. “He managed to make me hate him in no time at all.”

“Forgive me, Grandma, but you never acted like you hated him,” Charley said. “You grieved horribly after he died.”

“I slept more peacefully when he was gone than I ever had before. I grieved when Mama died, that’s when I grieved. Thank God I had my girls.” She hummed and picked up her coffee again.

Charley looked at Lou. “I never heard a cross word between them.”

“We did, growing up. But nothing worse than our friends’ parents.”

“When did all this start? She’s really hostile!” Charley said.

“I heard that!” Grandma snapped. “You’d be hostile, too, if someone took you out of your home and stuck you in some snake pit!”

A few more stories were told, Grandma Berkey taking center stage with many more stories from her youth than from her married years. She had fancied another boy as her future husband but he wasn’t a professional and her father had in mind a doctor or lawyer. When she met the judge, he was so respectful to her parents she thought it would be fine. She looked right at Charley and called her Louise three times.

Then, right in the middle of a sentence, she nodded off. Her head bobbed, her chin on her chest.

Jo and Lou exchanged glances and softly chuckled.

“We’ll have a small bite of lunch, if you’d be so generous, then we’ll take her back to the snake pit,” Jo whispered.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Charley said.

“No, we can’t,” Lou said. “Mother wanders at night. A bit of sundowning. Her snake pit is also a memory care facility. She has Alzheimer’s. I’m sure I told you that. She gets medication and she’s doing very well.”

“When did all this business about hating the judge start?”

“She’s always had her complaints but, you know, she’s very proud and wants to maintain her good reputation in society. She wouldn’t want her friends at the club, for instance, to think she didn’t have a perfect marriage—though I’m sure none of them did, either. Back in Mother’s day men were typically disrespectful to women in general.”

“Was Daddy?” Charley asked.

Lou shook her head. “Your father was a sweet man. Quiet and awfully boring at times, but he treated me well.”

“Roy wasn’t a chauvinist or abuser,” Jo said. “He was a hopeless alcoholic. If I’d known then what I know now...”

“Once we took her to the nursing home, she stopped worrying about her reputation and began referring to the judge as ‘that old bastard.’ I don’t know how much of it is real or a by-product of the disease. She was never so angry before.”

“She might’ve been and didn’t show it,” Jo said. “I know the judge sure made me angry.”

“He was widely known as a hanging judge. He didn’t seem to have mercy for anyone.”

“I’m proof of that,” Krista said, remembering what happened when she had begged for his help.

After waking, Grandma Berkey stuck to her script. She hated her husband.

“I wonder, Grandma, why didn’t you divorce him?” Charley asked.

“My parents died, the money was left to me in a trust and the judge would have never let me get away with anything. In those days only the desperate or notorious dared to get divorced. In the ’50s and ’60s none of us were happy. It wasn’t fashionable to be happy. Now all anybody wants is to be stupidly happy every second whether they deserve to be or not.”

Krista made a face. “A philosopher,” she said.

Chapter Nineteen

If there was ever a single event that could be at once hilarious, depressing and exhausting, the visit from Grandma Berkey was definitely it. She wore them out. And while her tales were completely plausible, she was clearly not playing with a full deck. She mixed up Krista and Meg, called Charley Louise and asked Jo to fetch her walker—she wanted to go to the sunroom.

It wore Meg out completely and she ate a little something, then went to her room to rest. Charley cleaned up the kitchen and went down to the dock with her phone. Krista opened her laptop on the breakfast bar, looking out the window. She was worried about both of them. Charley seemed to be crumbling under the weight of a broken heart, and Meg, it could not be denied any longer, was not getting better. No matter how many times you asked her how she felt and no matter how many times she answered, “Pretty good actually,” she was dwindling. Her eyes were rarely bright, her coloring sometimes became grayish and she was moving so slowly, so cautiously.

Krista sat before the laptop, trying to decide what to do next because, it appeared, in defiance of all reason, she was the most together member of their merry little group. She had Jake and what resembled a future, even if that was assuming a lot. She glanced down toward the dock to see Charley sitting cross-legged there, staring at her phone. It was an ominous future, she thought, if two people who loved each other could become estranged when exactly the right thing was not spoken in exactly the right way.

She felt grateful. She had health, something prison should have squashed like a bug. She had freedom. And she had a clear mind.

Meg was growing weaker. She would not be taken away from the lake now, Krista knew that. It was late August, Labor Day was almost upon them and the summer and Meg would be finished at about the same time. Poor Charley, Krista thought. Her losses keep growing.

And then a car pulled into the drive, parking behind Charley’s rented SUV. And Krista smiled.

* * *

Charley escaped to the dock the second Meg took to her bed. The three women had gone to their separate corners rather than doing a postmortem on their grandmother’s visit. Old age must be a great deal of work, she found herself thinking. Blessed few live to be beyond eighty-eight with a sound mind and strong body. At the moment she wondered if Grandma’s body was too strong. She needed help to physically get through the day—the simple tasks of washing and making her own food had left her several years ago. Stuck in that big old Grand Avenue manse full of stairs, she’d have fallen to her death in no time. She’d started in assisted living with a part-time nurse, and when she began to wander at night, she was transferred into memory care. Charley had visited a few times when she was home to see Meg. Louise was right—it was a very stylish, comfortable and bright facility while that old Grand Avenue manse had grown moldy and dark.

Charley kept staring at her phone, checking her email and her texts and her voice mail. Could Michael really leave her after all these years? Now? While Meg was so ill? While she was feeling so vulnerable and in such need of his—

She lifted her head at the sound of a vehicle. She hoped her mother and Jo weren’t bringing Grandma back. She turned around and gulped back tears. Michael got out of the car and walked toward her. She stood. She covered her mouth with her hand and she let go, let herself cry. One thing had not changed in twenty-two years. He was the most handsome man she knew.

Her tears came in gulps and her steps were slow and unsteady. He wouldn’t come to tell her goodbye, not Michael. He wasn’t that kind of man. She approached the end of the dock when he stopped, smiled at her and opened his arms. With a cry, she ran to him and filled his arms. She buried her face in his neck and he held her, her feet leaving the ground.

He rubbed her back. “Hey, baby,” he said gently. “Having a bad day?”