It’s lost on her why I wouldn’t emphasize my body parts, as she puts it, “especially since both of us were endowed with big knockers,” she likes to boast about what’s most important. I don’t dress or conduct myself anything like my sister. I never have and couldn’t possibly.

Ever since I can remember I’ve been incompatible with fragile female accoutrements and empty-headed attitudes. We simply don’t get along.

BENTON IS WAITING FOR me, chatting with the hostess Mrs. P at her station.

He grips his black leather briefcase with one hand, and in the other he holds his phone, typing on it with his thumb. He slips it back in a pocket as he notices my return from the ladies’ room, and I understand what’s meant by one’s heart leaping. Mine is happily jolted by the sight of him. It always is.

“A big improvement? Hmm?” He takes his glasses off, making a big production of appraising me, his eyes glinting with a playful light. “Do you agree, Mrs. P?” he asks her as he winks at me.

In her early eighties, she has a nimbus of wispy grayish-white hair, and round wire-rim glasses like a caricature of a prim and proper New England matron. Her face is doughy and wrinkled like dehydrated fruit, and her dress and matching jacquard jacket are a rose-trellis design in greens and reds that reminds me of a William Morris pattern.

Mrs. P tends to eye me curiously even when I don’t look overcooked and disheveled, as if there’s much she wonders about but isn’t going to verbalize. Several times now her eyes have dropped down to my bare legs, and then she looks up quickly as if she’s seen something she shouldn’t.

“What do you think?” Benton asks her.

“Well I’m not sure.” Her glasses wink as she turns her head back and forth like a tennis match, from him to me, looking at one, then the other, and the two of them have their shtick. “You know not to put me on the spot that way,” she affectionately reprimands him.

Mrs. P’s surname is Peabody, pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, a drawn-out PEE-b’dy, like the city near Salem. I’ve never addressed her by her first name, Maureen, and have no clue if those close to her call her that or Mo or something else. In the years we’ve been coming here she’s simply been Mrs. P, and Benton is Mr. Wesley. If she refers to me by name it’s Mrs. Wesley, although she’s well aware of my other life where most everyone else calls me Dr. Scarpetta or Chief.