Anna's grandmother appears, throughout Anna's youth, to be a placid and contented woman. It is only years later, when Anna returns to her grandparents' summer home to ask her grandfather for money, that she learns that her grandmother suffered greatly in her marriage, waking up every day for 15 years wishing she had died during the night. Anna's grandmother had been closest to her daughter Edith—also known as Babe—who drowned in a lake in young adulthood.
