How could Alma not have known? What a fucker Paul had been? Literally? Her, Linda, Milly K., that Iranian gal, both Porter sisters, Mag Kelly, Evelyn Sonderstrom. And those were just the ones she personally knew about! Everyone knew. How could Alma not know? You’d walk around town and there’d be tall pale nerdy Paul sneaking out of some house, or leading some gal (her, Debi, ha, guilty as charged) around the back of St. Jude’s for a quickie, humming “Kumbaya” ironically. A few days after that, he’d sent her a bracelet. Nice bracelet, actually. Still had it. She should donate it. To a woman’s shelter. Jesus, who had she been back then? Doinking a married guy? Behind a church?

No, you know what? She loved that woman. Praised that woman. That woman she’d been: authentic, spontaneous, never thought twice. About anything.

Just leapt.

Sometimes it was so frustrating! To have been born in the wrong time! In the future, she was pretty sure, people would be open and free, and fuck whoever they wanted, and live communally, all responsibilities shared, and if you dug cooking and cleaning and whatnot you’d do that, or if you were more creative, and felt more authentic hanging out with others, offering counsel re their problems, smoking a little hash to go deeper, you’d do that. Nobody would own anything or anyone. Everyone would do exactly what she or he liked, and nobody would gossip about anyone or look down on anyone or consider anyone slutty, and all of the houses would be exactly the same size, and if someone started to build some fancy addition, bang, everyone would be right there, going, No you don’t, we are all equal here, and if the person made a fuss about it, they’d simply—well, there’d be some sort of council. That would very fairly and systematically bring that elitist down. To their level. Make her live in a smaller house. For penance. And some of that wiser subgroup who had chosen to give counsel and smoke hash might symbolically take over the oppressor’s house. Just temporarily. And her husband. Until she was genuinely sorry. And if the elitist resisted, and refused to be genuinely sorry (as judged by them, the wiser subgroup), she could stay in that much smaller house until she relented, while the wiser group gathered outside, taunting her, enacting a sort of virtuous blockade, until she was nearly dying of hunger and—­

It was so unfair. She’d loved Paul and Paul had loved her, but she’d never gotten to live with him for even a single minute, and then he’d broken it off, and she’d had to drive by his house every day on her way to that stupid receptionist job, watching that ugly new addition go up (and up and up), and sometimes there’d be Alma, standing cross-armed amid the framing, smugly smoking.