Kate’s note was received by a pert-looking, officious type who seemed to be overseeing the delivery of a rather large painting. It must have had some value, for she had security guards with her. Before taking the note, she asked me who I was. I said, “No one.” She looked at me suspiciously. I continued, “It’s from my wife to Anna. They’re old friends.”

She said nothing and turned to go back inside.

I couldn’t help but ask, “When will they be moving in?”

“Soon, wouldn’t you think?”

I headed toward Muffins and More, where I squeezed into my favorite corner table and began to work, which meant reading the Post, the Daily News, and the Heights Press before hunkering down to reconceive the middle section of my dissertation.

Later, I fell asleep with my head in my hands and woke to hear the following from a voice I recognized: “He’s turned up the heat. What was an occasional drunken request is now an almost daily beg.”

It was Mom with Moxie (aka Claudia Valentine) talking to Martha Stewart Mom and Pretty-in-Pink Mom. They were huddled at their regular corner table, and Mom with Moxie needed comforting.

Martha Stewart Mom said, “Well, forget Dan for a moment. What do you want, Claudia? What do you want?”

Claudia looked around at her girlfriends and said, “That’s easy. I’m sick of not having enough money. The husbands in this neighborhood with their hedge funds and their cushy Wall Street bonuses. At the start of the longest bull market ever, who did I marry? Dan the Bear. Mr. Better-Safe-Than-Sorry. He sold our Microsoft back in ninety-six, he bought a bunch of AOL-Time Warner right before the bust, and he balked at Chad Bixby’s tip to get in on the ground floor of a little company called Google. For the last several years, our entire nest egg has been sitting in a money market account, making squat in interest.”

I started to transcribe her words, thinking Kate might enjoy hearing the kind of conversation she was missing.

“So this morning he tells me that Chad Bixby made a crisp four and a half million last week from his hedge fund, and then he asks me if I’d please let him try butt sex just this once. I mean, he’s begging for it, so I make Dan the Bear an offer: ‘Fine, sweetie. Make a million by Easter, and you can fuck me in the ass.’ ”

The other mothers gasped.

“Then I told him, ‘Make ten million, and you can stay in there permanently.’ ”

Some men wait their whole lives to overhear this kind of conversation.

Unfortunately, it was time for me to go pick up Teddy and Sam from preschool, so I stood up to leave. From the stunned expressions on their collective faces, it became clear that while they hadn’t noticed me before, they noticed me now.

“Don’t mind me,” I said, scooting past.

But there was no denying I’d heard everything, so to put them at ease, I turned and said, “Forgive the intrusion, but what happens if he doesn’t make the money?”