The cab had a strong cloying smell, some kind of sweet incense. A Virgin Mary icon swung on the rearview mirror. The driver handed me a business card when we stopped. “You call when you want to go back,” he said. “You don’t try to walk. Luck is like lightning.”

“Okay,” I said weakly, taking the card.

Main Street in Southampton was a line of small Colonial-style shops and restaurants, sidewalks in good repair, well-pruned trees, American flags waving. In other words, nothing like the small town I grew up in. Nothing like the vacant strip-mall towns of the rural West.

I walked down the sidewalk, past well-dressed families out to dinner—little perfect groups of four, the children better-looking miniatures of the parents—past jewelry shops and kitschy housewares and windows of pastel dresses.

I passed a teenage couple in the window of a candy store, sharing a milkshake. I went inside and lingered behind them, looking through a rack of postcards, waiting to hear what they would say to each other, hoping for an interesting distraction, but they just sat silently, passing the milkshake back and forth, staring out the window with vacant faces.

In a bin of random trinkets I found a little box, the size of my palm, with tiny decoupage daisies on top. I clicked open the miniature latch and found a tiny oval mirror inlaid in the lid. It was an out-of-place item, among little rubber balls, booklets of fake tattoos, and plastic children’s jewelry. I thought I might give it to Sienna.

The man at the counter said, “Only this? You want candy too? You want a bracelet?”

“No,” I said. “Just this.”

“You want chocolates?”

“Just this,” I repeated.

He shook his head, but wrapped the box up in tissue paper and put it in a little paper bag for me.

I wandered across the street and into an airy French restaurant with wicker chairs and white tablecloths. There were a few open stools at the bar and I took one of them.

“Gin and tonic, please,” I told the bartender.

He replied, “Can I see your ID?”

I pulled it out and he stared at it for a while, then looked at me as if trying to work out whether or not it was real. Whenever this happened I felt deeply uncomfortable, as if I really was pulling one over on everyone, as if I wasn’t an adult in some essential way that all the other people drinking were. Finally, he passed it back and went to fix my cocktail.

The man sitting two stools over turned and said, “You don’t look old enough to drink.”

They were ganging up on me. It didn’t have to do with my age, though, but rather the fact that I was dressed in cheap simple clothes, with no jewelry or expensive handbag. Like a teenager, or, in their world, like a child.