I strained to see out the window that overlooked Main Street, then listened for the bus. Yellow aspen leaves as bright as lemon disks shook in the warm breeze. No children's shouts announced the bus's afternoon rounds. Instead there was only the roar of a motorcycle and the rushing sound of Cottonwood Creek, already frigid with October snow melt from the high mountains.

I said, "Not yet. Ten minutes or so."

"I've been shopping," Marla said, "because I don't want to think about Laura. The stores are empty now that the tourists have gone. They didn't leave much."

"Maybe we didn't have much in the first place," I said.

"This place," wailed Marla.

I poured a cup of coffee and steeled myself for the coming barrage of complaints. The town would be the warm- up for the ex-husband.

She said, "How demoralizing to live in a terminally quaint western village."

I made sympathetic noises.

"Of course, I don't know why I would need a size sixteen cowgirl dress anyway," Marla complained, "since I'm not coming to this shindig tomorrow. The Jerk's going to be there, isn't he?"

"He certainly is," I said. "But I'm leaving the rolling pin at home."

Bad joke, but we chuckled anyway. The Jerk was what Marla had dubbed our mutual ex, for his personality and his initials, J.R.K Marla so intensely disliked seeing John Richard that it was hard to understand why she talked about him so much. Seven months after my divorce was final, John Richard ended a fling with a married woman who sang in the church choir and wedded Marla's bulk and wealth. They were divorced fifteen months later and she and I promptly became partners in anger. But before that point Marla's disgust with his extramarital antics had ballooned her up another thirty pounds, weight she'd used to good advantage when he came at her with a rolling pin. She had managed to heave him into a hanging plant, dislocating his shoulder.

I looked down at my right thumb, which still would not bend properly after John Richard had broken it in three places with a hammer.

"That rolling pin," Marla was saying between giggles, "that damn rolling pin. You could use it to fix him green tomato pie."

Without thinking, I looked at the menu. Tomatoes. Damn. Amid all the other grousing he had done, John Richard had been at pains to remind me of his allergies. to chocolate and tomatoes. I was planning to mince some of the latter and sprinkle the red bits on the asparagus vinaigrette, for color. John Richard would have to get mushrooms if I didn't want to make him sick. Oh, I thought as I poured my coffee down the sink and finished mixing the scones, the adjustments we make after divorce.

Marla had stopped laughing. "I have news," she announced. "He's bringing his new girlfriend..."

I shook my head and began to spoon mounds of batter onto cookie sheets.