Whenever Mrs. Bergeron mentioned Jake—always calling him “your stepfather”—Alice could hear the disdain in her voice. It was obvious that Gina had told her mother that she thought Alice was sexually involved with Jake, and that her mother disapproved. “I have school, too,” Alice said.

“Not in the summer you don’t. Look, if it’s money, I’d be happy to buy you a train ticket to go down. Tell the truth, you’d be doing me and Don a favor, just to have you check on her. She could use a friend from home, I’m sure.”

“I’ll think about it,” Alice always said, the words that would end the conversation.

In truth, Mrs. Bergeron’s pleas to Alice to visit her daughter in New York made Alice feel good. It was clear that something was wrong, that the modeling life wasn’t all nice restaurants, and handsome men, and glittering New York parties. Was Gina falling apart? Alice began to imagine visiting her, finding her drug addicted and abused in some grungy loft apartment downtown like the ones in Desperately Seeking Susan. Gina would be miserable, track marks up and down her arms, constantly crying. This became one of Alice’s favorite stories to tell herself, so much so that she began to seriously consider visiting Gina in New York, to make it actually happen.

She never went, but in early fall, before the beginning of her junior year at college, Mrs. Bergeron came into the drugstore to tell Alice that Gina was coming home for a few weeks, that she was simply exhausted from all the work and needed a break. “You’ll come over some night, won’t you, Alice?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Okay,” Mrs. Bergeron said. “But I’m going to keep asking, whether you like it or not.” She waved a finger at Alice but she was smiling, an impossibly wide, toothy grin that Gina had inherited. She did keep asking, and finally Alice relented, a Friday night in late September, because both Mrs. Bergeron and Gina showed up at the drugstore and begged her to come over for dinner that night.

“Do you have plans?” Gina asked. “If you have plans, then . . .”

Alice did have plans, but only with Jake. It was a Friday night, which meant he would return home with flowers or a nice bottle of wine. Sometimes he would stop at the new video store that had opened up over in York and pick out a movie to watch. But, even so, he’d probably be okay with Alice going to dinner at the Bergerons’. Well, not okay, exactly, but he’d be stoic about it. Alice just wanted to go in order to get it over with. If she didn’t go tonight, they would keep pestering her. “Okay, I’ll come tonight,” she said.

“Yay,” both Gina and her mother said at the same time.