Joey was sitting at the long glass table that was the center point of their lives, atop the chair with the bad leg. When she shifted, the chair rocked. Her feet met the stone ground, wet with afternoon rain. She opened her hefty paperback copy of Anna Karenina. She’d been reading it for two years, always in Corfu between the hours of six and seven in the evening. That was when Maisy and sometimes Bea prepared dinner.

Maisy was once a literature major at Barnard. She thought it was crucial that young women read. That was how they absorbed a slice of wider society. That was how they grabbed feminism by the horns.

Whenever Maisy spotted Joey reading, she said, “Good for you, Josephine. We’ve got dinner.”

Of course, Joey never confided that half the time she read was spent returning to page one. The terrace was too distracting for immersing herself into literature, especially by the Russians. Someone was always pulling up a chair and slipping a glass into your hand, so Joey would lose her place and return to the first page, starting from the famous happy and unhappy families line that she knew by heart. Today she stuck on that line, reading it a few times in unusual contemplation. She decided that her family was happy, despite their quirks, her mother’s in particular. As to Leo’s family, Joey’s gut said they weren’t happy, not as an organism unto the three of them. This was a sad, sobering thought, but in the summers, the Abrams and Winn families became one. So the happy family would lift up the unhappy one, right? Or maybe that was just something a person from a happy family could think.

Maisy slid a glass of white wine into Joey’s hand, snapping Joey out of her analysis.

“Oh, thanks, Mais! Can I do anything?”

Maisy sipped from her tumbler, depositing an imprint of red lips on the glass. “Nope. I got it! You know I’m back in my element now.”