“Are you kidding me? You look great.”

“Tell that to the Bunny Mother, the Wicked Witch of the Midwest.”

Jerry’s laugh was gravelly and surprisingly warm. On Highway D they passed a little white church with a small graveyard next to it. The weather was so confusing; cold and rainy one day, warm and humid the next. Now that the soil was damp and warm, farmers were busy plowing their fields, driving tractors they’d bought in Milwaukee and driven all the way from the factory back to their farms. Through the vents she could smell the familiar and strangely appealing scent of manure. Jerry sank a Mark Lindsay eight-track cassette into the player—old-guy music. She cringed when he began to sing along. “‘She must belong to San Francisco / She must have lost her way / Posted up poster of Pancho and Cisco…’” He strummed the wheel. Sherri remembered the blunt end of her father’s index finger. It had been cut off when he’d chopped wood as a boy, and, without a nail, made the fine watch repairs more difficult. He called it his tapping finger, and he’d tap it against the cover of a hard book to the beat of “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. When Sherri played the organ, she sometimes imagined the metronome was beating out time to that reassuring, firm tapping sound. Jerry had no such sense of rhythm.

He said, “East Troy’s not a bad place, you know. A week home will do you good.”

“It’s boring.”

“No, it’s not,” Jerry said, sounding like a chaperone. “Show some Trojan pride. It’s beautiful. Everything you’re looking at was carved out of ice thousands of years ago. Booth Lake? Lake Beulah? They’re just buried glacial ice. Richest soil in the country is right here in Walworth County. I’ve lived here all my life and it still takes my breath away. Arthur acts like he’s some Christopher Columbus discovering new land, but we’ve been here all along.

“Is Arthur from Chicago?”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Is he rich?”

“That’s a rude question. If he is, he’s a cheapskate. There are plenty of nicer homes on the lake with indoor plumbing and heat. Do me a favor. Introduce Arthur to some people, show him around. He shouldn’t be out there on his own getting tired of his own company. A young, single guy like that could turn into a hermit.”

Sherri was worried she was the one who would turn into a hermit—that was what she’d been all through high school while taking care of her mom. In that time, she’d missed out on a proper adolescence. She inspected her nails. She’d painted them in her signature color, Cutex peach. All the girls had favorite colors. The dorm always reeked of nail polish and remover.