“Tell him I died,” Marianne suggested, and Eric looked at her, just for a moment, as if maybe that were a possibility. “Never mind,” she said quickly. “Tell him you caught me cheating.”

The ring was not returnable, it turned out, and Marianne wasn’t sure what he ever did with it. Six months later Eric moved back home, and soon he married someone else, a girl he’d known in high school. Who gets engaged after three months of dating? They had been going out for almost two years when Eric asked her. Who leaves New York to go back to Charlotte?

It was just as well, she told herself, falling into her own rash commitment: a subscription to match.com, where she browsed painters and installation artists, spoken-word performers and trust funders. Eric was too nice and too normal, too much the kind of guy you would take home to meet your parents; he belonged with someone who actually had parents, not just a still-grieving father. “My boyfriend?” she told people, when they asked what happened to Eric. “He came down with male pattern blandness.”

That didn’t mean she didn’t think of him on those online dates: Eric would hate this movie as much as I do, Eric would never wear a keffiyeh, Eric would hold the door for me, ask me if I was cold, offer to pay for the cab. Eric would understand—not pretend to understand—when I talked about my family. Then she’d go home early, work on a poem, and send it to Eric.

It was October, a month still warm enough for shorts, when Marianne began to get inquiries from the applicants. (And from her sister, in response to a long handwritten letter: a brief email declining her invitation to visit and expressing mild interest in the Ranch.) She’d set up a temporary office by then, a space in a corner of the large rec room, with a desk for storing application checks, which she bundled and sent to Mark once a week. Determined not to miss another storm warning, she kept her radio tuned to the local NPR station. On her laptop, a small window displayed the Occupy livestream, where things were already falling apart: she never would have lasted there. It contrasted strangely with the conservative talk station she found herself listening to in the Jetta, another kind of stream where men went on about the decline of the country: No more Christmas tinsel in America’s grammar-school hallways. No more cursive in the classroom. But plenty of room on the cafeteria lunch line, they howled, for tacos y fajitas.