“It doesn’t mean that,” Janine insisted. She instinctively liked all insecure women: perennial dieters, remorseful child-spankers, closet smokers and binge drinkers and stress eaters. It gave her a role to play. She had a talent, she thought, for building people up—her own daughters, quite ordinary girls in many respects, anticipated extraordinary futures, Beth as a weather-forecasting television personality, Christine as a humanitarian leader of some sort. “When I write a poem, I don’t even remember having written it. Something just takes over. How can I take credit for something I don’t remember doing? Not that my poems are necessarily something to take credit for, but still. We’re all here, aren’t we, for a reason? You never know if someone else reading that poem will take comfort from it. Perhaps it will help them in their own marriages.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” admitted Maggie. “Maybe they’ll realize things could be worse.”

“Things could definitely be worse,” pronounced Lilian, smiling as if she had found just the right moment to tell them something terrible. She took two bites of chili mac, made a face like someone taking medicine, then chewed for an appropriately long time. Janine braced herself for what this woman might say. Finally she dabbed her napkin at her mouth, which glistened with grease even after she had wiped it. “I discovered that my husband was shopping for a new wife, online. Not a mistress, but a wife.”

“Oh no,” Maggie said. “On a dating site?”

“On a mail-order bride site,” said Lilian, pushing her plate away from her.

“They still have those?” Maggie asked. “Yikes.”

Janine was pretty sure that her colleague in the life skills department had found her husband through that sort of site. He was from Syria—directly, before the wedding, from Syria—and Gladys had never mentioned going on any trips to Syria. He was much shorter than Gladys, who returned from their Pensacola honeymoon wearing a hijab. They seemed quite happy. Janine thought she would not mention their story here.

“They are a booming, multinational business in legal prostitution,” Lilian told them. “I found the sites bookmarked on his laptop, and large funds mysteriously withdrawn from our accounts. Chinalove.com and Russianbride.com. He was still deciding. Apparently he didn’t have much of a preference, Russian or Chinese, so long as she didn’t speak English, was under the age of thirty, and wasn’t me.”

“I’m sure that’s not—” Janine began.

“I’m taking him for everything,” Lilian said. “I hope a double-wide in Bradenton suits her vision of the American dream. I hope she likes franks and beans.”

“Ha,” Maggie said. “That’s a slant rhyme.”