Sari puts a few things in her hand basket—two bottles of light pink wine; a tiny log of herbed goat cheese; and a small container of olives—and just as we turn toward the front of the store to pay, I see Gary and Gregory coming in. I now know the true meaning of the gratitude Sari is always tweeting about.

Gary and I make Save me! eyes at each other, while Gregory and Sari air-kiss and whisper into each other’s hair, like they’re at a cocktail party. Which they kind of are: within seconds they see more-important friends and drift away from us. Gary and I move toward each other like magnets.

“I hate them,” he whisper-blurts.

“Me, too!”

“He asked me if I wanted to drive his BMW. Which is sad, since it’s a 3 Series. I mean, it’s a nice car, but nurses lease 3 Series! What’s the big deal?”

“Did you drive it?”

He shakes his head, lowers his voice. “We got high before we left the house and I didn’t want to be responsible, so he took their Prius.”

“So the trip hasn’t been a total loss for you.”

“Some free shitty pot notwithstanding, Judy, it has been a total loss. No visit with my mother, which always yields some highly entertaining gossip about my sisters. No opportunity to meet chicks.” We both laugh. “Seriously. What are we doing here?”

“I have no idea. It’s all my fault.”

“Yes! It is!” He stops, in delayed shock. “That was so truthful! You’re never that truthful! What happened?”

“I don’t know! It’s just—I shouldn’t have spent all that money on this stupid weekend.” I don’t want to admit that I think he was right. That this whole thing feels phony. That Sari Epstein’s creativity retreat is just a slick way for her to make money off vulnerable people who think they need her help. Which I do, but still.

He looks around the store and signals to me: they’re heading back our way, slowly threading a careful route through farm tables laden with foods marked as WEEKEND PROVISIONS. “At least my exposure to them will end tomorrow.”

I ask him what he’ll be doing while I’m busy.

“Taking a tour of the glassblowing mill and visiting the local lutherie—the guitar-building school,” he says. “My own personal creativity retreat.”

* * *

Back at Sari’s house, we wait in the living room for dinner, looking at their books, mostly of the health and wellness variety, and at their photos—some little, some big, some hanging on the walls and some lining bookshelves and in silver frames adorning side tables. We see Sari and Gregory through the years: her hair morphing from long to short to long again; Gregory from bearded, to clean-shaven, and back to bearded; together and apart; with students and without. We walk around the room as if we’re in a gallery that’s showing art we’re not sure we like—we look, move along, look again. We see their marriage, vacations, work, evolve, in pictures; and yet who knows what happened in between the seconds caught on film. How it all wove together to make the whole of who they are. I think of our house, how we have only a few family pictures on the walls downstairs or on the bookshelves. Most are upstairs in my bedroom, photos of Teddy when he was two, and three, and five; asleep in his bed in plaid pajamas; pushing a toy plastic shopping cart in Gary’s mother’s yard; sitting on Gary’s lap on a bench by the Charles River with his hand inside a bag of Goldfish. If strangers came in one day and tried to figure us out from the photos on the walls, what would they learn? Would they be able to see the holes in our cloth? Would they be able to tell that we’re not at all who we seem to be?