Minutes later, sitting across from each other at a smaller, this time steel, table, eating small dishes of cloudberry frozen yogurt, Maureen voices a complaint.

“Sometimes I feel I’m losing you to this terrible thing that happened. That you’re never going to get past it.”

“No. Really. I’m not only traumatized. I was also surprised by what I was capable of doing. I’m kind of exhilarated at my competence.”

“Yeah, well, that might be another problem.” This crankiness is turning up fairly often. Of course, she has a perfect right to it. Maureen is stuck in an annoying set of circumstances. Instead of a blossoming romance, she’s getting Cate in random pieces scattered between her travel to New York, her trauma, and her taking care of Neale. If she could hold off being cranky at least until Cate is full-time back in Chicago and can sort out a few things. But she can’t.

Even if she doesn’t know all the specifics of Cate’s distraction, Maureen perceives the general inattentiveness. She’s also unhappy about the social engagements Cate slides out of, particularly getting together with Maureen’s friends, of which she has quite a retinue. Keeping these friendships lively entails dinners and reciprocal dinners, brunches (a meal Cate sees as a sucking time hole with eggs), a subscription to Hubbard Street Dance with Ingrid and Patty (an ex of Maureen’s). The list winds on. Maureen takes defection from any of these as Cate rejecting her social world. Cate, for her part, feels beleaguered trying to stay in step with Maureen. It’s like dancing on broken pavement.

apocalypse beach

Maureen is still asleep when Cate wakes up. She looks deep in there, definitely a couple of hours shy of getting out of bed. Then she will awaken refreshed, having missed out on the pageant of her own sputter-snoring, her twitching legs, her strangled nightmare screams. She’s like a road hog—passing on the right, tailgating, tossing hamburger wrappers out the window as she goes. Of course, she doesn’t believe any of it. “I sleep like a baby,” she says.

This is by now an inside joke. They are starting to have inside jokes. Every step forward with Maureen feels like it’s toward the edge of a cliff. She knows she should sit down and take a closer look at this feeling.