“Thanks,” I say. “Your hair looks incredible.” Her hair looks the same as it always does—champagne blond in tiny ringlets—but it’s important to repay a compliment with a compliment.

“Thanks,” she says, then revs the ignition. “I need to get it colored.” She peers over at my roots. “You have no grays, Dawnie. How do you do it?”

I flip my hair. “Blessed, I guess.” I am lying. I colored it a few weeks ago. Tara took me to her fancy salon. But they didn’t do much, just touched up my roots. My hair is naturally very blond. When I was a child it was nearly white, my eyebrows too. Steph’s hair is similar to mine but curlier. My curls are a little looser, more like waves, like the ocean.

“How have you been since the breakup?” Steph asks, and I frown. I don’t want to talk about being dumped. I want to go to a gay bar and flirt. Also, I don’t even remember telling her about the breakup. But I know I have a tendency to call my friends drunk and cry and scream and remember nothing.

“I’m great!” I lie. “Not my first rodeo.”

“Definitely not,” she says, then cackles. I cackle too.

I watch Steph merge onto the freeway with the grace of a Southern California girl.

“Honestly?” she says. “I never liked her.”

“Really?” I thought everyone liked Tara. She was the “good one” and I was the “bad one.”

“She was pretty but dull,” Steph says. “You’re much more fun than her.”

I smile. I needed that.

Jay’s Bar is not technically a gay bar, but it has a strong lesbian presence, more lesbian than most gay bars in the area. It has bloodred walls, which we always joke are the shade of period blood, and leather booths and a killer patio for smoking. Most of the lesbians hang out on the patio, so Steph and I bring our drinks out there. We park at a high-top table beside a heat lamp and scan the yard. There are a few cute women, but they mostly look too young for me. It takes years to generate wealth. I think. Clearly I have no idea. I’m forty-eight years old and drinking a four-dollar well drink, surrounded by twenty-somethings.

“How are things with Beth?” I ask, then light up a cigarette.

Steph unleashes a strained sigh, and I giggle. “Women are exhausting,” she says. “I mean, me too.”