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Betsy’s mind couldn’t focus on anything productive as she dragged herself out of her pale-yellow cotton sheets, brushed her teeth, and dressed in denim cutoffs.

Over the last few days, the sisters had whispered updates about the possibility of saving the house as they passed each other in the kitchen; nothing concrete, just small missives, but they hadn’t been able to find a solution yet.

Without money, they were out of options.

I can’t have this baby.

Betsy’s mind jumped like a television changing channels.

A lima bean was growing inside her, a complicated tangle of membranes tethering her to a future she hadn’t planned for, let alone considered.

She’d forgotten to make breakfast today, sleeping later than normal.

On her way into the kitchen now, she bumped hard into the side of the navy overstuffed armchair, the perch where her father had worn an indent from reading in the nubby fabric seat.

She imagined him sitting there with a newspaper stacked beside him, waggling his thick eyebrows over his tortoiseshell-style reading glasses: “You’re on your own, kid,” he’d say.

Don’t you think I know that, Dad?

Betsy carried the large, wired laundry basket outside and down the cellar steps to the makeshift laundry room.

It smelled dank with its partial dirt floor and windowless walls, but the washer and dryer worked fine.

There was a laundry line in the backyard, but today’s winds were gusty, too hazardous for the children to safely learn to sail.

The yacht club had canceled lessons, so she’d be home all day.

You should be ashamed of yourself . This is all your fault.

She envisioned her father storming off down the dock, refusing to look at her.

Her mother would stick up for Betsy, saying that she was exercising her sexual freedom—until she realized it was her daughter she was talking about.

Then her mother would curl into herself in her study chair, her heart turning to steel, glaring at Betsy: How could you be so stupid?

While waiting for the sheets to finish in the washer, Betsy brought a large box into the living room so she could begin to organize the bookshelf—a stack of her father’s biographies aligned on the top shelf, her mother’s row of pop culture titles in the middle one, everything from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying to Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

A potential buyer didn’t need to see all her parents’ political opinions displayed, she’d decided, and a part of her agreed with her father’s paranoia—what if someone snuck in a camera and snapped a photo of their personal belongings, their identities defined in a Smithsonian someday by that one photograph?

Instead, Betsy dusted each book, wondering how the words between the covers had shaped her parents’ thinking, before stacking several into the box.

Then she went about wrapping family photographs into newsprint and tucking them in a second, smaller box.

Everyone had scattered after breakfast that morning.

Her mother went up to the study to work on whatever nonsense she was writing, while Louisa and Aggie, desperate to get the kids out on a rainy day, took the children to a singalong at the public library.

They returned home a few minutes ago, Aggie racing upstairs to get the baby down for a nap.

Now Tabby worked her Play-Doh while singing a nursery rhyme at the dining room table.

“Hey, Betts?” Aggie called from the next room after coming downstairs. “You probably shouldn’t pack up all the books. They look nice on the shelf.”

From her spot on the faded Oriental rug, Betsy looked up from a stack of photos: her father holding a giant fish on a boat somewhere in Vineyard Sound; her mother, shading her eyes in a lounge chair and wearing a modest one-piece, with baby Aggie clapping on her lap, toddler Louisa digging a sandcastle beside her.

It had been quiet since Louisa went back to Washington early this week; she was due to return on Friday, just after the house went on the market.

“I’m not, just some of the more progressive ones.

” Betsy adjusted the navy-blue bandana she’d tied around her head like a headband.

Housework was like a salve. It kept her mind calm.

“You know what I’ve been thinking? Mom used to make us read all those feminist books as teenagers, and I never felt like I could really express a true opinion.

Maybe we should read them again now. Start a book club and talk about what we really think of them. ”

You could have the baby, you know.

Betsy shook the thought off, then waited for her sister’s response.

“I think we should do the Ouija board again and ask about our futures.”

“God no.” Betsy rolled her eyes. Inside, a flash of panic about the lima bean. Imagine the Ouija board suggested that she was pregnant, and she had to explain over a midnight snack why she’d been carrying crackers into bed at night. “I have to go and get the sheets.”

Aggie followed Betsy to the back door as she readied to brave the winds outside. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? You haven’t stopped cleaning the house for days. I mean, I appreciate you washing the spittle rags and towels, but it’s starting to get weird.”

Softly closing the screen behind her, Betsy forced a smile as a gust of wind blew her ponytail off her neck. “I get accused of not helping enough. Then I get accused of doing too much. I can’t win in this house.”

She felt her sister’s eyes on her as she traveled down the concrete steps, the cool air of the cellar making her shiver. As she pulled the damp sheets out of the washer, she heard Aggie yell out to her: “I’m in for the book club.”

The wind howled, blowing against the cellar door, and for a moment Betsy worried it would slam the metal door shut, sealing her into the darkness.

But a square of light remained at the cellar stairs.

The person she needed to talk to was Andy.

He needed to know that there was a lima bean growing inside her, and a part of her wondered—her rib cage feeling tender at the very thought—if the news might nudge him in a different direction.

On a walk in the Ramble of Central Park, he had told her that he wanted children.

Betsy finished stuffing the sheets in the dryer, adjusting the temperature to high heat, the drum of the dryer thrumming. Maybe he would see this surprising development as his one chance.

A second unexpected squall blew in from the Cape on Friday morning, this time with sideways rain and fog that made Betsy dig out a hooded spring jacket from the closet.

She was free again, with sailing canceled a second day.

Breakfast made, Betsy padded into the dining room and sat at the formal mahogany dining table with a piece of notebook paper in front of her.

She twirled her pen once, and began to write. By noon, she had a finished version.

Mom, do you remember the summer you and I had a book club and we read all those rah-rah women books, like The Yellow Wallpaper and A Room of One’s Own?

What’s funny to me now is that I realized in a psychology class last year that I wasn’t honest with you about what I thought of those books.

I was never honest with you about what I thought about anything, because I never felt there was room for anyone’s opinion but yours.

I kind of want to read those books again, all of us, and we can reexamine our ideas about womanhood.

Because I’ve decided that what interests me most about you and Louisa and Aggie is not what we tell each other. It’s the things we don’t.

Setting the pen on top of the letter, Betsy went to the coat hooks in the kitchen and pulled on her windbreaker.

She set out for the village, trudging along the cobblestones in the rain.

She’d slept terribly the night before, waking up at three in the morning with a deep ache in her chest, deciding that today was the day she would tell Andy.

She felt in her pocket for the roll of dimes she’d taken from the kitchen drawer, the sole of her sneaker finding grip on the slippery edges of the cobblestone sidewalk.

Her body was damp with weather and nerves.

There was a phone in the lobby of the Edgartown Town Hall, and she’d remembered as she’d pressed her cheek into her freshly washed pillowcase last night that it was one of those telephone booths with a door for privacy.

Hurrying into the white clapboard building now, Betsy took a second to shake the rain off her jacket, closing her umbrella and gathering her wits.

The silver booth stood in one corner of the red-carpeted lobby, and as she walked toward it, every soggy step took the energy of a hundred.

Betsy tried to predict how the exchange would go, deciding that when Andy heard her voice, she’d know in an instant how he felt.

The folding door jammed as she tried to close the aluminum and glass panels, and she jimmied the handle to seal the booth shut, the smell of the musty New England Telephone phone book overtaking the stuffy air inside.

Betsy heaved her hobo-style purse onto the aluminum shelf, pulling out her pocket-sized green address book.

“Long distance, please,” she told the operator.

She relayed the phone number, and the woman instructed her to insert two dollars and ten cents.

“Thank you,” Betsy said, her body quivering as she stuffed the twenty-one dimes into the phone.

She wouldn’t have long, maybe a few minutes, before the operator returned to the line to tell her to insert additional dimes per minute.