Tess said, “I’d like to thank you for not lecturing me when we were stuck on top of that godforsaken mountain at Canyon Ranch. I don’t think I could have handled it.”

Andrea said, “I had my speech all prepared.”

Tess said, “I did okay without the speech. I finally, finally did okay.”

Andrea said, “You did better than okay, honey. These children are beautiful.”

Tess said, “So I just have one other question.”

“Shoot.”

“Will you be Chloe’s godmother?”

“Oh my God,” Andrea said as she sank onto the side of the bed next to Tess, because this she had not been expecting, this was an embarrassment of riches, two darling babies to guide spiritually, the way she had been guided by her mother’s sister Katharine, the way Tess had been guided by her Aunt Agropina. They were, Andrea felt at that moment, all going to be okay. “I would be so honored.”

JEFFREY

He was going to give them one shining moment together before things fell apart.

And really, it should be his wife telling this, she was better at it than he was, she remembered every last detail about each one of their group trips, down to what they ordered for dinner, who sat next to whom on the airplane, and what the bar bill was at the end of the night. But Delilah wasn’t available and this story needed to be told, even purely as an antidote to the sad and difficult material that came before and to what was yet to come.

South Beach! Miami!

There had been so many great things about this trip, but perhaps the greatest thing was that it was spontaneous, pulled together in five days.

It had been the most brutal winter of all time. Brutal! The temperatures were in double-digit minus figures for a week straight. The harbor was frozen and the Coast Guard had to send an ice cutter through so the steamship could make it back with fuel and food. Even so, the Stop & Shop was poorly stocked and the butcher was closed. The Begonia was open, technically, though only half the menu was available, and one night they ran out of draft beer completely and there was nearly a riot. It was that awful second week of February when the realization hit: there was no more football. Nothing to do on Sundays but eat too much, drink too much, read the paper, and play Scrabble, which was what the eight of them did. Barney and Drew were four and two and the twins were three, and all of them had perpetual head colds and runny noses, which were impossible to beat. You kept them home, you gave them Campbell’s chicken soup with stars and let them watch unlimited episodes of Caillou and Miss Spider, they got better, then you put them back into the petri dish that was preschool and they got sick again. The situation was wearing on everyone. Around their harvest table, Jeffrey saw his wife and their six dearest friends looking pudgy, pale, listless, and crabby. They each had a section of the Times (dealt out like poker hands; it was very much the luck of the draw, except that Phoebe always got Sunday Styles), and on that particular awful football-less slate-gray ten-below-zero day, Jeffrey had the Travel section. He was halfway through his third Kahlua coffee (to which he had, uncharacteristically, added a shot of whiskey) and the cover photo—a bunch of half-naked people drinking mango mojitos in South Beach—seemed to mock him.

That is where we should be, he thought.

Then he thought, That is where we should be.

He excused himself from the table. The Scrabble game was growing predictable anyway, with Addison trying to get away with the word qat once again. He claimed it was Russian for “hat,” and since he was the linguistic expert among them, no one bothered to contest it. Though today Delilah was in a combative mood and said, “No foreign words.”

“What?” Addison said. “You can’t make that rule now.”

Delilah said, “I should have made it seven years ago.”

Jeffrey slipped over to the computer in the corner of the kitchen, taking his Kahlúa/whiskey coffee and the Travel section with him. He proceeded cautiously; he read the fine print, he clicked on every link. South Beach: this was, he realized, simply a reinvented, reimagined version of the Miami Beach his parents and grandparents had visited a generation before. Except now it was Cuban food and nightclubs with monosyllabic names like The Drink and BED. Now it was cocktails made with freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices and art deco hotels with rooms draped in white Egyptian cotton. One might not think that South Beach was a farmer’s kind of place, but it was eighty-seven degrees in South Beach and sunny. Jeffrey was going to make this happen.

Ninety minutes later (with breaks to refill his “coffee” and change the DVD for the kids, with seven answers over to the table of “I’m working on something here, give me a minute”), he had reserved eight tickets on American Airlines, Boston to Miami, for $237 per person. And he had, on hold, the penthouse suite at the Sagamore Hotel, which was locked in like a Lego between the art deco gems of the National and the Loews. The penthouse slept eight and cost $1050 per night. It was less per person than the Radisson in Hyannis in the height of summer. The last piece of the puzzle was baby-sitting. The Kapenashes always used Mrs. Parks, the retired dispatcher, and for the other kids, Jeffrey e-mailed the Bulgarian twins, Lana and Vesselina, who had worked at the farm market the summer before and who had (unwisely) decided to stay on Nantucket for the winter. To see what it was like! (Did it rival a former Communist bloc country in the gray and dismal department? How about twenty-four hours with no bread at the supermarket?) Jeffrey and the Bulgarian twins joked about how bad the winter was, how boring, how cold. Would they want to make an extra five hundred bucks baby-sitting?