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She would have liked for Adelaide to stay a bit longer. The girl had always been Junietta's favorite among her three granddaughters. That is, if grandmothers were allowed to admit such a thing. She had spent more time with Addy as a child than with Cordelia and Ernestine, who often ran off and left their little sister behind. She'd been a shy girl, sensitive and serious, who'd loved to listen to Junietta tell stories. Bible stories had been her favorites. There was one particular Bible story that had been on Junietta's mind all day—the one where Jesus happened upon a funeral in which a widow was burying her only son. The Lord had taken pity on the grieving woman and raised her son back to life. What Junietta wouldn't give to have her son alive again.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Children were supposed to bury their parents, not the other way around. Junietta stared at the silver tray and teapot, her arms too heavy with sorrow to lift the pot and pour tea into the fragile cup. Grief, weighty and suffocating, immobilized her body while her mind refused to stop shuffling through a lifetime of memories and regrets and what-ifs.

Her son was dead. Where had the time gone? His life had passed so swiftly, the days piling up into months and multiplying into years. She could picture A.B. at age nine or ten, curly-haired and bright-eyed and endlessly curious. He'd loved to take things apart to see how they worked, then he would beg her to help him reassemble them again. A music box. The cook's coffee mill. A pair of binoculars. And one time, his grandfather's magic lantern. But when A.B. turned sixteen, she had lost him to his father's and grandfather's influence. Now she'd lost him forever.

Junietta finally lifted the teapot, but her hand shook as she tried to pour, splashing tea everywhere but in the cup. This wasn't the first time in her life she'd experienced this debilitating shock and loss. Back then, she had found the strength, somehow, to go on with her life until time finally sanded off grief's painful edges. She would have to move forward this time, too. Her charitable foundation was much too important to leave to chance. In fact, it was the last thing she had spoken to A.B. about before he died.

He'd surprised her by returning home to New York early from their summer home in Newport. "There's something important at work that I need to attend to," he'd told Junietta. She'd taken the opportunity of their time alone together at breakfast one morning to tell him about the symptoms she'd been experiencing: the racing heart, the fatigue so deep that hours of sleep couldn't erase it, ankles that swelled grotesquely and made wearing shoes impossible, her shortness of breath, her lightheadedness.

He'd been instantly alarmed. "I'll send for the doctor!"

"I've already seen the doctor, dear. Several, in fact. They all say the same thing. There's no cure for an aging heart that's wearing itself out." "Then you must rest. Get out of this stifling city and spend some time by the sea. Why not come to Newport with me when I go back, and let the fresh salt air revive you?"

"Newport is the last place I would go to get rest! I get dizzy just thinking about the endless rounds of social events that spin like a carousel that's out of control. And the bland drivel that masquerades as conversation would bore me to death long before my heart was ready to give out. No, I want nothing to do with Newport."

She saw his love and concern in his worried expression. "Listen, Mother—"

"No, Son, please listen to me. I didn't tell you about my heart so you would fuss over me and try to mollycoddle me. It's the charitable foundation that I'm worried about." She had founded it nearly fifty years ago and had run it ever since, raising and distributing millions of dollars to help the poor. She'd dedicated her life to her work. But she knew she couldn't run it on her own anymore. "You know how much it means to me, A.B., but I need to step back from it now. Will you help me find someone I can train as my replacement? Someone who'll care about it as much as I do?"

"Isn't there someone on your current staff who could take over?"

 

"I've given it a lot of thought, and while they're all good at what they do, there's no one who seems just right for the position."

"I see. Yes, of course I'll help. I promise I'll find someone. But in the meantime, you must promise me that you'll follow the doctors' orders and do exactly what they say. That means following directions for once in your life." He'd smiled when he'd said it and kissed her goodbye. Junietta hadn't promised him any such thing, of course.

It was the last time she'd seen her son alive. A day later, he had returned home from work in the early afternoon, complaining of a fierce headache. By the next morning he was dead. She had never imagined that he would be leaving this world before she did.

She thought again of Adelaide. With A.B. gone, Addy was all that Junietta had left. She had never been close to her daughter-in-law, Sylvia, whose interests rarely coincided with her own. And Junietta had been unable to have any influence on her older granddaughters, Cordelia and Ernestine, who'd been married off to a Boston Brahmin and an English nobleman. God alone knew what their marriages were like, how inane and purposeless their lives had become. But she still might have a chance to rescue Adelaide. If she could find the strength. If her aging body granted her enough time. She had to convince her beloved granddaughter not to settle for a life of mindless conformity, squandering the few swift years God might give to her.

Junietta took off her shoes and propped her feet on the hassock as the doctors had instructed. Then she reached for her Bible and opened it to her favorite psalm, though she knew the words by heart. They would be her prayer, for Adelaide and for the foundation. "Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom....establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it."