Arthur was young—older than she was, but not by a lot. Where’d he get money like that? “You bought one of those big new houses?”

“No, I got a little one.”

“But there aren’t any little houses left,” she said.

“Get this,” Jerry said. “There was a lone piece of property with an old cottage on the point between Mill Pond and the main lake. So overgrown you can hardly see it. That’s where the retreat director stayed. It wasn’t part of the initial sale because the lot was nonconforming. They just left the place for the raccoons. So when Arthur comes to me and says he wants to buy himself a lake house, an old one, ’cause for whatever dumb reason this guy likes places that make you tired just thinking about ’em, you know what I do? I call the superior general—the Black Pope himself! Turned out they’d forgotten all about it. So now Arthur here owns a tumbledown cottage that’s been abandoned to time. But you stand there and look out at the lakes and I swear to God, you feel like you’re standing on the prow of a ship.”

“That’s great.” Sherri suddenly missed East Troy, especially the lakes. She didn’t understand why she’d occasionally feel these pangs of homesickness for a place that all her life she’d wanted to leave. She was thinking about the lake when she looked up and saw that the room captain was watching her. She had to move it along. “Excuse me for a moment,” she said, and stepped away to deliver the bill to the customers at the next table.

“What can I get you boys to drink?” she asked when she returned. She’d learned that men Jerry’s age loved being called boys. She wiped down the table, set a clean ashtray on top of the dirty one and picked them both up in one hand, set the dirty one on her tray and put the clean one down on the glass table with an efficient tap.

Jerry said, “How about two Harvey Wallbangers?”

Sherri thought it was rude of Jerry to order for his friend the way he’d order for his wife.