“Oh, right. Sure.” Fiona gazes off into the distance. Sherri almost feels sorry for her because she’s so clearly out of her element. She’s lovely, with a little turned-up nose, pouty mouth, and shiny shoulders. Sherri has so much advice she wishes she could share with the younger woman, but Fiona wouldn’t listen to Sherri any more than Sherri had listened to the people who’d tried to steer her down a different path back in the day. Fiona brightens. “Sculpture is my favorite!” She says this as though she’s describing her favorite flavor of ice cream.

After the meeting, Sherri notices that Fiona’s dog had taken a dump right outside the front door. She runs to the café and grabs a napkin to clean it up, washes her hands, and spends the next twenty minutes timing how long it takes for the elevator to travel to the third floor and back down. She needs to calculate how much time it takes to transport sixty elderly guests to the upper gallery in time for a fundraiser. Sherri doesn’t mind the boring minutiae of event planning, because she knows too well that the smallest overlooked detail could turn a party into a disaster.

She chats with the security guards and the cleaning people while she works—she knows all of their names, and the names of their spouses, children, and grandchildren. They like her because she never pulls rank. She’ll stay late to stack chairs and collect soiled linens. She’s no stranger to hard, physical work, and she never complains. That’s a lesson she carried from her Bunny days—you never let on when you’re exhausted or angry. She tries not to let on that she’s upset because the director of development was recently let go, and Sherri was asked to assume his duties in addition to her own. She plans to take it up with management, but she doesn’t complain to her staff that her salary hasn’t changed, even though his earnings were almost twice her own.

While eating lunch at her desk, she startles when she opens an email from Jerry Derzon. He almost never emails. She reads that he’s suffering from stage-four pancreatic cancer, and it is time for her to return home (East Troy will always be home) to deal with the building he’s been managing all these years. The news makes her heart heavy—as heavy as a Chevy, as Jerry would say. She doesn’t have the energy or the will to pretend otherwise.