Back at the house, she sits at the edge of the pool with her submerged legs moving in slow circles, the late-afternoon sun bearing down on her, a bead of sweat rolling down her back. She’s on her second gin and tonic. So, Jerry is sick, she tells herself, again and again, remembering the smell of the rum-soaked Crooks cigars he used to smoke. Jerry. Is. Sick. She thinks of the gold crown on his incisor that gleamed when he smiled, how he’d kept a yellowed linen handkerchief in his front pocket to dab away his sweat. She reverses the direction of her leg circles. Sick, that’s what Jerry is.

Jerry’s poor health will change things for her. She never would have believed that Jerry of all people would have become her unlikely savior all those years ago. It was because of Jerry that she was able to leave Wisconsin and embark on this new life. She’d read once about giant machines in Los Angeles that keep the salt water out of the fresh water aquifers under the city; if the machines were to stop working, the whole city’s water supply would become tainted. Jerry had been like that for her, a force that kept her past and her suffocating guilt from contaminating her present. But now he’s preparing for his own absence, and she’ll finally have to go back to East Troy after almost forty years away and deal with the messes she’d made, back when she was in the midst of all her foolishness.

No. She can’t possibly return. She looks around her yard and watches a hummingbird dart its beak into the chuparosa. She has a pretty, organized life with everything she’s ever wanted: sunshine, a job she’s good at, a lovely home in the Movie Colony district, modern furniture. The pool people come on Tuesdays, the cleaners on Fridays. She and Bayard have standing court times for tennis and golf and pinochle with friends, lots of friends. Even her underground sprinklers are on timers, watering her garden at standard intervals.

She looks at the slumbering San Jacinto Mountains in the distance. She thinks of oak trees and fields of soybean and corn, crumbling barns and dairy bars, her father’s dusty poetry collections, stilettos, torn nylons, black ice, and Bach—and of that horrible day when Arthur, her dear Arthur, was suspended in the air, his back arched, his hands shot up above his head, the light on the water dazzling. The sky was a glorious backdrop of purple, blue, orange, and red. Late-summer sunsets in Wisconsin were always the most violent and dramatic, and that one was burned onto the backs of her eyelids. She saw it all the time, along with Arthur in the foreground, a floating arc suspended in Sherri’s mind—an eyebrow raised in confusion, an apostrophe about to release possession.

CHAPTER ONE

East Troy, 1981

Roberta was late.