A little later, while she was scouring the kitchen sink, she heard his uneven footsteps approaching. She looked over her shoulder.

“How’s it going?” he asked. His eyes were glossy, and, even from across the room, she could smell the alcohol on him. She wondered where he had his supply stashed.

“Fine, thanks!” she said; a reflex. In fact, though she’d been laboring to stifle her foolish conceit, she hadn’t succeeded in ridding herself of the powerful feeling she’d had when she’d gotten to be the one to disapprove. She had cleaned the refrigerator—a particularly odious task—and wiped down the countertops and now the sink. If she washed the cupboards and the walls and still felt proud, she dreaded what she would do when she got home to the bungalow. Pick a fight? Slack on Byron’s supper? Smoke in front of him? It could be all-out war, if she didn’t get hold of herself.

“That’s good,” JJ said, taking out a cigarette.

She went back to her scrubbing.

“So, Dolly,” he said. “How’d you get roped into this job, anyway? How’d you meet my dad?”

She kept her head down as she scrubbed. She felt sweat pop from her pores. “Oh, you know,” she said breezily. “Church.”

“I didn’t think he’d even been back here in a couple years.”

“Oh, well, you know,” Dolly said, scrubbing. “He wrote to the church and asked them to find someone, I think. Something like that, anyway.”

“I’m just surprised he didn’t mention anything about you. Especially when he asked me to come up and look at the house.” JJ laughed. “What he said, actually, was, ‘You’re not doing anything this summer, are you, son?’ Summer’s his busy time with his sailing business in Stone Harbor. So I figured, what the hell? I hadn’t been back here in a couple years myself.”

“Really!”

“Sometimes I can’t believe I ever lived here at all.”

She stopped her scrubbing and looked over her shoulder at him again.

He waved his cigarette hand, leaving an arc of smoke. “Hell, listen to me,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said, turning to face him. A drop of water fell from her sponge onto the floor. “I don’t mind.”

His only response was a twist of his mouth. He smoked for a moment, and watched her. She met his gaze.

He spoke first. “What does your husband think of you spending all this time over here?”

She turned and resumed scrubbing the sink. She felt her pride deflating—a relief, really, though she was wistful for it before it was gone. “He—he works a lot.” She concentrated hard on a dark spot on the sink.

“Was he in the war?” JJ asked.

“Yes!” she said. “He was in Europe, in a tank battalion.”

“See some action?”