The Chiclets became the Unbecoming, which morphed into the Stellars. They won a Battle of the Bands here and there; they played around New England in dive bars and hip basement venues. They scraped together enough money to do their own studio recording and waited for their big break. And waited and waited and waited. Joy went from groupie, to young wife and mother, to single mother, to single mother and business owner. Dustin capitulated; he got a job at a tech company that did something nebulous with storage. He married Sandy; they had Tiki. Joy imagined that life for Dustin became both exciting and pedestrian.

“Not good enough to go anywhere with it,” she said finally.

“He told me that,” Maggie said.

“He did?”

Maggie nodded. “Last time I was there. It makes him sad.”

“It does?”

“Yup.”

A small seed of sympathy sprouted somewhere inside Joy’s heart. She tried to dislodge it, but it stuck there, refusing to budge. All these years Joy had wished bad things for Dustin. The revenge plots she’d hatched in her mind, the ill fortune she’d visited upon him in her imagination. See what you’ve done? She wanted to say that to him a thousand times in the beginning. There was the time when the heater in her car broke and it was the middle of winter in Fall River and she’d had to layer blankets over Maggie’s car seat to keep her warm. There was the time she had a meeting with the small business loans department of a bank in Narragansett and she’d prepaid for Maggie to stay two extra hours at day care and ten minutes before the meeting she’d received a phone call saying Maggie had just projectile-vomited in the sandbox and could Joy please come pick her up immediately. The time when Maggie’s school had held a father-daughter dance and Maggie had cried herself to sleep because she hadn’t been able to go. See what you’ve done, Dustin? To your daughter? To me? So you could chase your silly little dream! See what you’ve done.

But now she wouldn’t say that. Now she’d say this: Thank you. If Dustin hadn’t left her she would never have known how resourceful she could be. In the literal sense of the word: how full of resources.

“He was good,” Joy said now. “He was very good, really, Mags.” (She could tell that Maggie really wanted him to have been good.) “But the music business is hard. There’s talent but that’s not all it takes. There’s a certain amount of luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time, that sort of thing. And if it doesn’t happen by a certain point, well, you sort of have to accept that it might never happen.”

“Yeah,” said Maggie. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry he’s sad about it,” she said.

“You are?”

“A little.”

After a while Maggie said, “I miss Anthony.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.” Maggie looked sidelong at Joy. “Don’t you?”