“I have one more,” Lisa said. “But you’re not gonna like it.” She gathered her hair over one shoulder and twisted it. “So finally Karen went out with a professor who a friend set her up with. She thought she couldn’t go wrong with a friend of a friend. And she was really into the guy, seemed like it was heading in the right direction. He was smart, polite, funny, had a good job, spoke nice about his folks but didn’t live in their basement . . . So the two of them started spending some nights together. And then, out of the blue, one night while they’re in the middle of doing it, the guy asks if she wants him to hit her. You know, during sex.”

Poppy pitched back, terrorized.

Lisa continued. “Karen said, ‘Uh, not really,’ and he did it anyway. Kept at it, too. Put his hands around her neck and squeezed. Said it really turned him on and all the other women he’d dated were OK with it. She tried to talk herself into being OK with it, thought maybe she was being a square. And then, amidst all this, she found out the guy was sleeping with half his students. So . . . yeah. That last one really messed her up in the head. I don’t think she’s been on a date since.”

“I should think not! Who are these people? And we’re supposed to raise daughters in this world?”

“It’s rough out there,” Lisa said. “How’d I get into this anyway? Oh, right. What I’m trying to say is that Karen might not admit it, but I think she would gladly take her husband back at this point, affair and all.” Lisa picked at a knot on the armrest of her chair. “I think she’d be better off if she’d stuck it out in the first place, though at the time everything inside her was telling her to run.”

“I don’t know,” Poppy said. “I think she was right to follow her heart. I think people usually are.” She rubbed her eyes. The sun felt like a weight on the world. “If you can’t trust your own heart, what can you trust?”

Lisa was quiet for a while, then she said, “I think things aren’t always as they seem.”

“Even your own heart?”

The melancholy changed shape and moved around inside Lisa, oozing and shifting like oil in a lava lamp.

“Well, anyway.” Poppy released a heavy sigh. “You’ve depressed me.”

“Me too. Sorry.” Lisa patted Poppy’s hand, then reached up to brush a few curls away from Poppy’s bright sweating cheek. “Still,” Lisa said softly, “sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like.”

“If you’d married Rex Wright?”

“Hah!”

Poppy knew this would get a laugh. Rex Wright was the dishwasher at Luigi’s, the restaurant where Poppy and Lisa had worked together in high school. He kept his hair shaved clean and shiny to the skull and had a drawn-to-scale lightbulb tattooed on the back of his head. He had spent his twenties in jail for armed robbery. Management was too scared to fire him, though they knew he was snorting amphetamines in the employee restroom during his shift. Rex had been hopelessly in love with Lisa when she worked at the restaurant and gave her a stuffed koala bear that smelled powerfully of cigarettes and old perfume.