Besides, she was too busy in the present to be haunted by her past or to worry about her future. Even when she wasn’t working, the orders swirled around in her head: roast rack of lamb, make the Sidecar with cognac instead of cheap brandy, up, not on the rocks, cream with the Jamaican coffee, no ice in the water, lemon on the side, separate checks please, more butter, bring us another round, honey, only make mine a double. She smiled and tried to playfully avoid the men who’d try to grab her tail. She dipped and dipped until her knees felt like they’d get stuck in a bent position.

The pills worked better than any diet. Food? She didn’t want it. Not a bite. Food was another country, suddenly strange and foreign, gross even. So warm, so brown. She’d look at her guests’ plates and see dressing that was thick and oily, and gravy that was a curtain of goop. Cheese was chunky, potatoes were the color of dead flesh. The meat, all marbled and red, bled and bled. She could see every single calorie.

One afternoon Carmen organized a trip to Chicago with the girls to visit a quack doctor Carmen had met at Sugar Shack who injected them with hog tranquilizers, swearing the treatment would help the women lose weight. It was really speed, that’s all it was. The girls ran around like they were being chased by bolts of lightning.

One afternoon, Sherri finished her shift and saw that Ola had left her another note:

ARTHUR CALL HE MISS YOU

She felt a tug in her gut when she again saw Arthur’s name in Ola’s block handwriting. He called and left messages all the time, and when he did, he briefly came alive to her with a startling vividness. She could practically hear the low timbre of his voice as he spoke to Ola. Sweet, sweet Arthur. She hungered for his touch, so intuitive she swore he knew what it felt like to live inside her skin. But what good did it do her to miss him? It was the end of July, the very height of summer, and he wasn’t due back for almost a month. He couldn’t go away for so long and expect her to stand frozen in place, waiting for him. She needed to prove to herself that she could be OK on her own. He was perfect in so many ways. He was a little older than she was. He was worldly and smart. Yet he was also a burden—a delicious, intoxicating burden. Thoughts of him set off an emotional tug-of-war, a push/pull where one minute she would marvel at her independence, and the next an image of him walking naked in his bedroom would flash in her mind and she’d think about his smile.