“Anyway,” Poppy said, chomping on an apple slice from her sangria, “why don’t you just have an affair? Or move back to Wheeling, find you a good ol’ boy.”

Lisa laughed. She spread her polished nails over the table to examine them. “You joke,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure Scott is actually having an affair by now. Been going on for quite some time, too, if I had to guess.”

“Really?” Poppy stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

Lisa said, “I thought about telling you before now, but then decided it could wait till I saw you in person. There’ve been a couple times I caught him in lies but never could quite prove it.”

“Like what?”

“Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Lisa picked at her nail polish, blew away a stray fleck. “He’ll say a happy hour with his buddy Jordan kept him out all evening, but then the next time I see Jordan, he won’t know anything about it. Or one time I was trying to reach him at his office and he wasn’t picking up his office phone, so I called the secretary at the front desk, and she said he hadn’t been at work all day. That evening I told him I’d been trying to reach him, and he said, ‘Oh, my office phone must’ve got unplugged again.’ Then, when I told him I’d gotten through to the secretary, he got all flustered and said she must be mistaken. Swore up and down he’d been there. I mean, come on.” Lisa rolled her eyes and laughed harshly without smiling. “But even if it weren’t for the lies, it’s obvious in other ways.”

“How so?”

“He’s just different. Distracted. Jumpy. Mind always somewhere else. And he was hounding me for sex all the time when we were younger. Even after the girls came, he was still pushing for, you know, at least a few times a week. But it dropped off suddenly a few years back,” Lisa said. “And nowadays, I mean, it’s like . . .” She paused and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Never.”

“How long’s it been?” Poppy said, pushing black curls from her eyes.

Lisa thought. “Before Christmas was the last,” she said.

“Jesus.” Poppy drank the last of her sangria and crunched into an ice cube. She caught a chunk of cheek between her molars and warm iron flooded her tongue. She winced, then offered Lisa a grotesque, bloody grimace.

Lisa recoiled. “Did you just lose a tooth?”

Poppy laughed, wiping blood on the back of her wrist. “Doesn’t Scott fancy himself some kind of a saint? Dragging you and the girls to mass every Sunday, and that creepy crucifix around his neck? Isn’t he supposed to either behave right or shrivel up and die from guilt?”

“Seems like he manages to avoid that guilt part altogether,” Lisa said. “As far as I can tell, in his view if he wears that crucifix and hits communion once a week, he’s pure as a lamb.” Lisa was quiet for a bit. Her green eyes swirled bright with the reflection of blue sky. “When I think of him with another woman, though,” she said, “it’s like I almost . . . Put it this way, if there is another woman, part of me almost feels grateful to her, because he requires so little of me. He’s clearly getting what he needs somewhere else, so I’m off the hook. Know what I mean? In my heart of hearts,” Lisa said, pinching her nostrils, then releasing them, “if he’s having an affair, I don’t think I give a shit.”