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There were cobwebs in the corners of the living room she hadn’t seen the night before, and before Virgie could even think of attempting breakfast, she found herself going about the house with an upside-down broom and brushing them off the ceiling.

The lace curtains in the living room had yellowed, and she fetched a stepladder from the root cellar, accessed through a pair of metal doors outside, so she could remove the drapes for washing.

Then she opened all the windows despite the early morning chill, determined to free them from the stale air.

By afternoon she’d have the wood floors gleaming, the fridge wiped clean, and the cupboards stocked.

There was that low-level vibration in her hands again, almost like the muscles of her fingers were trembling on the inside.

But when she stared at her hand, she could hold it perfectly still.

Nerves, her doctor had told her. A flare-up that had started on the highway yesterday all because she dreaded the phone call with Charlie.

She had phoned him last night after she and the girls put clean sheets on the beds and everyone turned in for the night, but there had been no answer at their small Kalorama rowhouse.

The last nuclear fight they’d had was last August. They’d left the Chilmark estate of Senator Prescott of Massachusetts.

He’d had a party to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

She and Charlie were cutting through the back roads by the illuminated Ferris wheel of the Agricultural Fair when Charlie asked why she’d spent so much time talking to Wiley Prescott, the senator’s younger brother, who happened to be a bit of a playboy.

The truth was that she’d noted Charlie’s continual checking in on her from afar, and she’d tried to get out of the conversation, but it had been an interesting chat.

Wiley had said the women reporters at his family’s Boston newspaper were the best of his staff, and when she mentioned that she had always wanted to be a writer, he encouraged her to contact an editor at a paper in New York, which was how her Dear Virgie column had come about.

Last week, after reading her latest column, Charlie had marched into the kitchen where she was pan-frying salmon and yelled: “Do you even think of me when you write these things?”

Do you even think of me when I smell the perfume of another woman on your collar?

Virgie hadn’t said that about his latest dalliance—suspected, never confirmed—although she’d wanted to.

Instead, she’d flipped the fish in the pan.

“I simply did the math, Charlie. If a woman cooks six nights a week from the age of twenty-five until the average age of seventy years, she will have cooked fourteen thousand dinners. I’m not even counting breakfast or lunch.

” Of course, Virgie had also suggested in her article that the burden on women might be unjust; that while men wanted to imagine their wives prancing about the kitchen like gazelles, they often thought of cooking as a dreaded chore.

While running a dust cloth along the living room bookshelves, Virgie wondered when exactly things had gotten so fiery between them, but it was hard to say.

Certainly not when the girls were little or before he won his first election.

In those first few summers on the island, after they inherited the summer house from her aunt and uncle in 1951, Charlie was a first-term congressman from New York without any committee obligations.

They’d begin each weekend with scrambled eggs and a walk on the beach while passing Louisa and Aggie from one pair of arms to the other.

At night, they’d listen to the radio by lamplight near the open windows and snuggle on the navy-blue couches.

It was her father’s brother who bought the house in 1935, but he and his wife, Celia, never had children, so each summer they adopted Virgie as their own.

By the 1940s, the island changed immensely when the air force used the Vineyard’s landing strip to practice dropping air bombs, and when the war ended, some men stayed.

By the ’50s, summer tourists had discovered the island, thanks to a reliably traveling ferry; in Edgartown, there was a fruit stand, a barber, a hat store, and a few pool halls, and life everywhere was altogether simpler.

“I’m starving, Mom,” Betsy muttered as she came downstairs.

Her youngest child was an early riser, and Virgie smiled at the sleep crease across her daughter’s cheek. “I’ll look through the cupboards in a few minutes.”

The thud of the newspaper slapped against the front door; the work of their reliable paper boy, a local kid named James who lived across the harbor.

Betsy ran to the window to knock and wave at the scrawny child on his rusted bike, and he waved back, a sweet smile brightening his face.

The boy’s arrival was as predictable as everything else on the island, a neighborhood built upon tradition and community.

Virgie gazed out at the view of glistening Edgartown Harbor, the small ferry to Chappaquiddick arriving on the small island opposite them.

She went about opening the cabinets, finding a bottle of canola oil and an unopened box of pancake mix she’d been smart enough to put in the refrigerator before they’d left; there was no syrup, but this would do.

She plugged in the Frigidaire, the refrigerant gurgling back to life in the ice box.

A mouse skittered across the baseboard, disappearing behind the stove.

Virgie screamed and jumped about like her feet were on fire.

It was something no one told you about summer houses: you never knew what kind of critters you’d find when you unlocked the house for the season.

In the middle of the third pancake, Aggie and Louisa yawned their way into the kitchen, hair scarves still tied about their heads from sleep.

“What is she doing?” Louisa said, disgusted at the sight of Betsy lying on her stomach on the wood.

“Probably licking the floor,” Aggie sighed.

“She’s catching a mouse, and it’s more than I can say about you two sleeping beauties. I need help in the house today.”

“We have a mouse?” Aggie lifted her feet up onto the seat of the wooden chair.

Louisa rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “We always have mice at the beginning of summer, and in July will come the ants. Isn’t summer grand?”

Virgie ignored them, putting three plates out on the table and delivering each of her daughters a couple of pancakes, pouring herself tea after from the singing kettle.

“No butter?” Aggie opened the fridge.

“No syrup either. We’ll go to Cronig’s this morning, and everyone can pick what they want to eat for breakfast this week.” It seemed like a good idea, Virgie thought. Then she wouldn’t have to deal with their complaints that she was making the wrong thing.

The doorbell rang, which made Betsy yell for everyone to shush: “The mouse is never going to come out if we’re all talking.”

“No one cares about some dumb little mouse,” Louisa said.

Virgie inhaled. “Louisa, go answer the door.”

“But I’m in my pajamas.”

“We’re all in our pajamas. It’s probably the milkman.”

Virgie turned off the griddle. There was talking at the front, a man’s voice, and Louisa bounded into the kitchen. “It’s the Edgartown Police. He wants to talk to you.”

“Me?” Virgie rinsed the mixing bowl, running a sponge along the sides.

Turning off the faucet, she wrapped her robe tighter around her waist. Police made her nervous; she’d once been pulled over by an officer in Washington for making an illegal left turn, and he’d leaned into the car and reached for a lock of her hair, caressing it between his fingers.

“Good morning, Chief,” Virgie said, approaching the front door.

He held his brimmed hat at his waist, nodding. “Ma’am.” His car was parked on the street, the lights flashing as though he’d pulled someone over in a traffic stop. “I got a call from your husband this morning.”

Charlie had called the police? “Oh?” she said. “Whatever for?”

The police chief was younger than she imagined, maybe about her age. “He said you took his children here? That you left without his permission.”

They weren’t his children; the girls were their children, and last she checked, she was the only one who cared a hood’s wink about them, too.

“I assure you, Chief Watters, that this is my summer house, and my husband knew I was bringing the children. I wrote him a note and left it on the kitchen counter myself.”

He leaned against the doorjamb. “You’re telling me he knew you were coming, but he’s telling me he didn’t. Which is it?”

“You know, Officer,” she took on the voice of a woman who put her husband first. She was that woman, so she wasn’t even faking it. “Charlie is a United States senator, and he’s often under a lot of pressure. Sometimes he’s up all night before a big vote. It’s quite possible he’s a bit delirious.”

“He sounded quite rested,” the officer said.

Jerk , she thought, watching as the milk truck pulled behind the cop car. “You see, Charlie has several campaign events this month, but I wanted the girls to swim and sail. To get out of that overheated swamp. Have you ever been to the Capitol in summer?”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s dreadful. The air is so thick you can barely breathe. Anyway, please, let me call my husband and figure this out.”

The officer’s broad chest filled. “Listen, I don’t want to get involved in a domestic dispute—”

“There is no domestic dispute,” she cut him off, smiling, then stepped out onto the stoop to clear out some old leaves. “I can assure you that I did not kidnap my own children.”

His car lights were flashing. Every neighbor on the block would be asking her what had happened. “Let me give you a piece of advice, ma’am.” The officer backed down a step. “A good woman speaks her mind without knocking her house down. Do you know what I mean by that?”

It pained her to nod; what did he know of what women needed? “I think I do, yes.”

“Good,” he said, turning back to his squad car. “Now go call your husband.”