Joy turned on Chapel Street, braking for a horde of jaywalkers.

“Summer people,” said Mrs. Simmons.

“I know!” said Joy, hoping she could steer the conversation away from marriage. “Just the other day I couldn’t get into my own parking space—”

“So when?” said Mrs. Simmons. “When will I be going to your wedding?”

“I’ve already been married, Mrs. Simmons. It didn’t work out. You know that.” They had some version of this conversation every year: Joy told Mrs. Simmons how Dustin had left the marriage to pursue his dream of becoming a rock star. “I really need to focus on the band,” he’d said. “If I’m going to get anywhere.”

To that Joy had said the cruelest thing she could think of, maybe the cruelest thing she’d ever said to anyone: Whether or not you focus, Dustin, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re not going to get anywhere. Because you don’t have any talent.

He left anyway.

“Dustin,” said Mrs. Simmons. “I don’t know how he let you go.”

“Well, he did,” Joy said. “Somehow he managed.”

“His loss.”

“Thank you.” Joy paused. “It was a long time ago. I’m over it now, really I am. And anyway, if that marriage hadn’t ended, I wouldn’t be here! I wouldn’t know you.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Simmons conceded. “You came here to heal something that was broken. A lot of people come here for that.”

This was a surprisingly insightful comment from Joy’s passenger, and it was also true.

When Joy was nine years old her father’s older sister, Branca, who had no children of her own, had rented a house on Block Island and invited Joy’s parents, Joy, and her brothers to stay for a week. The house had been near Vaill Beach, backed by a dramatic cliff, reached by walking down a path through Snake Hole Road. It had been one of their only family vacations; closing the auto repair shop for that many days was too great an expense for her family to absorb more than that one time. Joy had never been as happy in her life as she’d been that week on Block Island. When Dustin’s departure punched a hole in her heart and she felt something substantial and essential leaking out of it, she’d come back.

“You can’t be married to those moon pies, you know.”

“Whoopie pies, Mrs. Simmons. They’re whoopie pies.”

“Either or,” said Mrs. Simmons.

Joy set her lips together and said nothing. Joy’s mother’s mother, Fionnula, whose family had settled in Roxbury after leaving County Offaly, Ireland, worked as a young woman at the Berwick Cake Company, where the whoopie pie was first manufactured. (This statement was super-controversial, Maine and Pennsylvania also claiming provenance.) Fionnula had a special liking for Joy; Joy was the youngest, and the only girl, and the most Irish-seeming product of her middle daughter’s marriage to a Portuguese Fall River auto mechanic. (Her snub nose. Her feistiness. Her tendency toward sunburn.) And so, when the rest of the family was at the shop—the boys working on the cars, Joy’s mother keeping the books—Fionnula and Joy baked and baked and baked.