I went through the motions of asking, “How do you know the host?” while I looked for the host. She was a friend from a previous job who sent me yearly invites to garden parties that I never attended. Every year a freshly designed envelope would show up in my e-mail inbox, inviting me and Bobby. I didn’t like couple things: couple dinners, couple vacations, and movie outings with couple dinner conversations afterward.

I listened as people talked about buying houses, or looking to have another child, and felt like a foreigner in this strange land where everyone had their shit together. I went to sit at a picnic table that had been set up and did breathing exercises while I stared at a vine of jasmine that a gardener had purposely draped over a fence separating this house from the house next door, which was nearly identical.

“How do you know the host?”

I turned around and saw a man staring at me with a smile. He had salt-and-pepper hair that looked like it had appeared on his head a decade too soon. And the cuffs of his button-down shirt looked like they had taken him more than a few minutes to roll to an adequately effortless length, which could convey “laid-back.”

“I don’t remember, actually.”

My chest seized for a moment. Was this a person who was hitting on me or just a person? I looked at his fingers and saw a ring and let go of my breath. I was safe—he was off-limits.

“Mysterious.”

“A meet-up for women, I think.”

“Power women.”

“Women without power.”

“Even better,” he said.

“You think so?”

It was at this point that his wife walked over to present herself as “the wife,” so there would be no question of supremacy.

Already a little drunk, she eyed me as she asked my name.

“I like when young women are named old-women names,” she said.

“Sarah,” her husband said.

“It’s a compliment.”

“I didn’t say ‘Esther.’”

“‘Evelyn’ counts, too,” she said.

He smiled at me, a “bear with us” smile.

She was holding someone’s phone and shoved it into her husband’s face.

“Look at Peggy’s vacation photos.”

She was done sizing me up. I could tell we weren’t that far apart in age, but she had the look of someone who was the boss at her job, and her husband had the look of someone who had been slightly emasculated over the course of the last decade.

“Let me go find her so she can tell us where she went.”

She disappeared into the couples. I adjusted my leg, which was falling asleep, and said, “I need to move my leg, but I don’t want to kick you.”

“You can kick me, but I’ll want to pay you for it.”