My own daughter left me a breezy little voicemail saying, “Mom, you don’t need to come this summer. Paul thinks it’s better if we keep the lake house for our family,” as if the cedar walls, the sage green door, the dock, the porch swing, and every nail in that place hadn’t been paid for with my money

Grace Pierce, sixty nine, a retired postal worker with a bad hip and a good heart. She had not left the state of Alabama in eleven years.

I asked her where she would go if she could. “Somewhere with an ocean. I want to hear what waves sound like in person,” she had told me.

Carolyn James, sixty six, a former principal and widow who sang in the choir every Sunday like it was the only time she was permitted to take up full volume.

Sherry Whitaker, seventy one, who buried two husbands and one son. She once told me she cried every night but was just private about it.

Five women. Five lives I understood because they rhymed with mine.

I called each of them. “I want to take you to the Gulf Coast,” I said. “One week. Ocean view. My treat.”

“Why, Dorothy?” they asked.

“Because I have the money and I have the love and I am done giving both to people who waste them,” I replied.

The silences on the other ends of those calls were sweet. It was the stunned confusion of women who have spent so long being useful that being invited to receive felt indecent.

I booked a beachfront house in Gulf Shores. Six bedrooms and a big porch with a view of the white sand.