She lunged for him but did not strike him this time. He fell to the ground in anticipation all the same. He tried repeatedly to stand himself back up but his patent-leather shoes kept slipping on the ice. Mary-Sue laughed. Each time he fell, he became more and more disheveled.

“Help . . . !” His voice was hoarse. “Somebody help me!”

“Look at you, Mr. Evans. Look at you now.”

She walked briskly to her car, got in and vroomed away.

Mary-Sue gathered up all the little bottles from the minibar. She lined them up like a firing squad in front of the TV and drank them one by one. She was in a suite that had been booked for her at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, another old landmark that had become as shabby as the rest of the Midwest. Anyone who had any sense at all moved out to try their luck in California or New York; the ones who stayed either had no imagination or no choice. Her father she once imagined had both, but he’d chosen to remain in his home state out of some spiritually ruinous notion of loyalty.

She made a toast to the capitol building, shimmering against the black winter’s sky. She toasted the uneven tan on the wallpaper. She toasted the decades of toe cheese in the thick-pile wall-to-wall. She toasted the butt sweat in the leather club chair, the tumbler that probably once held some old industrialist’s dentures. The whole hotel was a dying white man. Iowa. Fucking Iowa, man.

When she was done toasting, she shut off the lights and crawled into bed.

Mary-Sue spent her teen years in Des Moines plotting her escape, reading New Yorker listings in the public library and studying the subway map that her father brought home from a business trip. Cosmopolitan Manhattan, she believed, was where her destiny lay, and she vowed that once high school was over, she’d hop on the quickest train there and never look back. When the time came, she did just that.