Melissa glares across the table. “There’s more than one reason a man will keep his nose clean,” she says. “Sponsorship opportunities, sure.” Her husband, surly on the mound and haggard-looking even after a good night’s rest, has done very few corporate promotions over the years, while Jason’s face is plastered everywhere. If she’s being honest with herself, Melissa will admit it is brilliant brand-building—Herb Allison has always been good at that. For now she holds up a pinkie. “But maybe he has a little something to hide? That’d explain his holier-than-thou behavior—and the divorce.”

The women cackle at that.

After Christmas break, in a classroom across town, Liana—she kept Goodyear, of course, what baseball wife wouldn’t take and keep her husband’s famous name?—drilled her students on subtraction and looked forward to the spring arrivals, promising herself she would try doubly hard to reconnect, to preserve all those meaningful friendships she’d built with cheerleaders and waitresses and art historians, women who have nothing in common except for their men.

Jason had preferred she socialize out of the house, so an appropriate fuck-you was to throw a welcome-back cocktail party the first Saturday of the spring season in their home. Her home. And the baseball wives came in droves, the Lions’ but some other teams’, too, even a few other exes, a pair of retirees (skinnier than ever, their faces stiff with Botox), and, somehow, two women who both claimed to be Jimmy Cardozo’s recently exed girlfriend. Hillary Oliveira worried there would be a catfight between them, but Melissa sized up the two women, watching how they watched each other, and shook her head. Nah, they’ll be fine.

It was a stellar party—Liana’d invited a midlevel celebrity chef to make the finger foods, a locally revered mixologist to man the bar—and everyone was excited to catch up. The wives doted on Liana. How are you doing? She was fine, she said with the tone of an aggrieved and regal widow. She was getting by. If anything, Melissa noticed, Liana was more beautiful than when she’d first appeared in the family section, her blond ponytail pulled through the back of one of those snap-back ball caps; more beautiful than when she and Jason were married in a secret ceremony in Hawaii. (Melissa bought Star that week and examined the grainy clandestine photos in her bathtub.)

Are you dating again? Hillary asked.

Liana shrugged, bare shoulders as wide and polished as a wooden coatrack. She’d played beach volleyball for Arizona State; apparently got as far as the Olympic trials for 2004. Oh, you know.