“I’m not judging you on any kind of moral basis. But it just—it seems like you and your sister were in an actual relationship. I’ve never had the issue come up before. Or even heard of anyone else having it. I guess that’s a little troubling.”

“It wasn’t exactly a relationship. We saw other people.”

Everything Maureen adds to this story only further tightens Cate’s cringe.

Maureen is ready to brush away the subject. “You’re going to have to get more information on me. So this thing doesn’t stand out so much. We need more space filled with more details.”

Cate nods, then looks over at Sailor, who is sitting at attention, begging a treat off someone way down at the end of the beach. He sees her, though, and by the time she and Maureen reach the parking lot, he’s caught up with them. She doesn’t need to look back; she can hear the clink of his tags behind her.

excursion

She loves to swim, but some winter days are not for diving into even indoor water, and she just heads for the gym.

The guy on the treadmill next to Cate today isn’t watching ESPN or CNBC, but rather the closed-circuit camera in the gym’s daycare room. Two toddlers are rolling a giant ball back and forth, rolling and laughing. The guy is in his fifties; she hopes the girls are his granddaughters.

Unlike him, most of the people who work out at this gym are inconspicuous, interchangeable; they don’t show up on her radar. She probably doesn’t show up on theirs. Over time, though, a core group has sifted out. The really sweaty guy, the corpulent priest, the scary anorexic. The lady cop with the terrific body and year-round tan from the beds in the gym’s basement, but so tough it’s hard to imagine working up the nerve to have sex with her, although Cate does imagine.

This noninteractive companionship is comfortable for Cate.