“What makes you say that?” Poppy said.

“Mainly the fact that I behave like one.”

Poppy laughed.

Lisa said, “The way he talks about his job has really started to bug me. Drives me up a wall how he’ll skirt around the truth of it. He’s very good at that, you know, dodging the truth of things. I used to be the same when it came to his job. You remember, I’m sure. I didn’t want anyone to know and judge. Took me forever to fess up to you that he worked for a debt collection firm, not law. But I just don’t care anymore what people think of him and what he does for work. I’m sick of the charade.” Lisa paused and combed her fingers through her ponytail. “Not sick of the money, though. There’s always that to consider.” She lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. The pretty features of her face were hard, as if they’d been set in a mold. “We had to take our names out of the phone book. Did I tell you that?”

Poppy shook her head. “How come?”

“People Scott was filing suit against would get his name off the paperwork and look him up. Then they would leave these messages on the machine, begging him to drop the suit. Sometimes crying, sometimes hollering, threatening him and the family. Desperate people. Who could blame them? God, what a mess.”

Poppy frowned. “Did you feel unsafe?”

“Not really. We had that ADT mumbo jumbo installed. Nothing ever came of any of it, and we don’t get the calls anymore, ever since we got an unlisted number. But . . . well, anyhow.” Lisa released a heavy sigh and drank an inch of sangria in one sip. “You know how things are with Scott. I don’t need to go too far down that road at two o’clock in the afternoon.”

Lisa was deeply unhappy in her marriage, but that was old, old news to Poppy.

Poppy fingered the stem of her sangria glass and said, “Why’s this thing so small? Am I supposed to stick my pinkie out like this? Is that how the rich do?”

Lisa laughed but was finding herself slightly irritated by Poppy’s constant references to the expense of things around the house and her commentary on how out-of-place she felt there. It reminded Lisa of how uncomfortable her own mother was in her and Scott’s home. Though they had been living there for twenty years, Carol still tiptoed around the place like she was in a museum. One time she had spilled red wine on a cream-colored loveseat and almost cried, even after Scott and Lisa assured her again and again that it didn’t matter. Carol refused to wear shoes in their house, despite the fact that everyone else did. It was obvious to Lisa that regardless of what measures she took as a host, her mother would never, ever be at ease in her home, and now it appeared that would be the case here at the beach house with Poppy, too. It bothered Lisa that people without money seemed to think they could squawk on and on about people with money, all the ways their lives seemed so different and strange, whereas Lisa would never dream of breathing a word about their lives or homes.