"If I had a backyard," she said one day, "I could just bury it until I returned."

"After the guns stop? In spite of what Cousin Lou thinks, you're not really a refugee, Mother." Annie was immediately sorry she'd spoken. If her mother could read her tawdry divorce as a heroic wartime thriller, who was she to deprive her of that pleasure? At the same time, though, Annie was exhausted by the giddy self-pity of both her mother and her sister. They seemed to consider this miserable move to be a grand and tragic adventure. Annie envied them, at some level — how could anyone find such heady satisfaction in defeat? But at another level, she had no patience for an attitude that she knew would mean all the decidedly unexciting details, like organizing the mover and ordering packing materials and figuring out how to pay for the unexciting details like the mover and the packing materials, would fall, inevitably, like dead leaves in autumn, to her.

"It's a metaphor," Betty was saying. "You've heard of those, Miss Librarian."

Miranda, who had jammed a straw hat from deep in the closet on top of her head and wrapped herself in a lace tablecloth mantilla, placed herself between the two of them. "Don't fight. The Gypsy family has to stick together."

"The Joad family is more like it," said Annie.

And she could envision them clearly, their mattresses lashed to the roof of the jalopy, making their trek along the dusty roads to labor in the fields of Westport, Connecticut. But she was mollified now, smiling at the thought, for "jalopy" was a word she had always loved.

But even as they packed for their neo-Depression life together, money was in shorter and shorter supply for the three Weissmanns. Joseph and Betty had long ago become accustomed to the bountiful solidity of the upper reaches of the upper middle class. They were, by the standards of any but the rich, rich, and money was a comfort for them, rather than a concern. Betty's shock, now, was real and showed itself primarily in a tendency to undertip.