Alex and Kate had started sleeping together three months earlier, after meeting at a scantly attended honky-tonk concert at the VFW Hall on Main Street. Kate was the executive director of a women’s health nonprofit in town, and Alex heard her “community connection” PSA on the local NPR station twice a day. He told her, numerous times, that she was “too hot for radio”; she had a freshly bleached, very short haircut and tall boots. She was in the process of divorcing her husband due to a “whole truckload of bullshit,” and she’d talked to Alex at length about that, and about her recent obsession with Scandinavian crime fiction, and Gillian Welch, until the bar closed. Then she’d surprised him by inviting herself back to his messy apartment out by the Walmart. Once there, she ordered him to his knees. It was a strenuous, educational night, significantly more demanding than his previous casual encounters. He drove her back to her car in the morning.

“Is that how things usually go with you?” he said.

“Boy, you have no idea,” she said.

Alex had assumed this was a one-shot deal, something to be brought up in a drunken bout of sexual trivia someday. But instead, they started spending a few nights a week together, at his place or at her empty new rental on the north side. Kate, straddling his chest, said he was “boy cute,” and praised his pliant body, which was flattering since he had started on a serious beer gut and was careless about his grooming. She had very specific notions about the tenor of their relationship—she was having new kinds of fun in the wake of her marriage’s collapse.

Once she was done working him over, Kate asked him questions about his friends and ex-girlfriends and family, even though he saw his life as a minor farce compared to hers, with the soon-to-be-ex-husband, the budget cuts at her organization, her mother in a long-term care facility, the kids crashing toward and through puberty. She chided him for thinking that way. “Your problems aren’t less valid just because you’re young,” she said. Except, of course, that they were.

A couple of nights after the pizza shop incident, Alex was at Kate’s place, reading Cynthia Ozick essays at the kitchen island while she made spaghetti sauce.

“You doing anything fun this weekend?” she said over her shoulder.

“My dad’s visiting, actually,” he said.

“Oh, that’s fun,” Kate said. “Am I gonna get to meet him?”

“Do you want to?” Alex said.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “Unless it would make you a worried little puppy.”