Hazel figured, sooner or later, one of three things would happen:

1. Welfare would dump her.

2. She’d fall off the wagon.

3. Her mom would move in with her boyfriend, who, no matter how well he got along with Hazel, would be unlikely to, in tandem, take in a thirty-year-old transsexual ex-hooker in recovery.

Or maybe all of those things would happen at once. Regardless, she didn’t imagine this quiet un-life would last forever. So, in the meantime, she hoarded her cash, went to AA and the nascent sex workers’ rights organization, and shut off her brain. And one of few bright spots in imagining her future was when she indulged this loving spot in her past and scanned the internet in search of Christopher.

Well, Hazel did do one other unusual thing in this period. She went on a date.

Marina from the nascent sex workers’ rights organization—Marina who was not a sex worker but who was a grad student—introduced them. Marina knew the guy through a lefty something-or-other. Hazel had seen him around at a couple things. He was cute. Tall, blond hair, glasses. Good politics, ungregarious. Hazel was into all of this.

“You’re getting dressed up?” asked her mom that evening.

Hazel was in the bathroom with the door open, in a flowery blue dress, applying eyeliner.

“I’m going on a date,” said Hazel.

“A date,” said her mom slowly. “Where?”

“Baked Expectations.”

“No kidding,” said her mom. “Your dad and I went there once. Long time ago.”

“I haven’t been on a date in years. A real date, anyway. I don’t remember the last time that happened.” Hazel said this awkwardly, still relearning how to talk to her mother, as an adult, a woman, a person commiserating.

Her mother softened at this. “No, huh?”

“Nope.”

“It’d be nice if you met someone,” her mom said quietly.

Hazel turned to look at her. What a normal conversation, she thought. What a normal conversation for a daughter and a mother to be having. Her mother shut the door behind her, and Hazel stared at the towel hanging on a hook, her feet shifting in the fluff of the rug.

The guy had a steaming tea in front of him when she sat down, and he invited her to get a coffee or something.

That was the most disappointing part. Not even dinner? Hazel thought.

He didn’t get her, but he was smart, turned out to run an after-school arts program, and by the end of the night she’d started to like him. “I did a workshop in the country,” he said. “Seventh-day Adventists, right? And they asked me if I was an atheist, and I said yes. They had this look of shock on their faces. Then they said to me—I swear—they said, ‘Do you live in Osborne Village?’”

Hazel laughed.

It was eleven o’clock when he revealed he had a wife. And a kid at home. They were opening up their relationship after thirteen years. “She’s cool with us being here,” he stressed, as if this would soothe her. When he drove her home, he joked about making out in the car and she got out the second he parked.