“Just like that?” said Anthony, appropriately horrified.

“Just like that,” she confirmed. “He said that he really needed to focus on the band, if he was going to get anywhere.”

“And did he? Get anywhere?”

“No. That’s the worst part, or maybe the best part. Of course he realized it was never going to happen. Of course he grew up. Of course he got a regular job, with health insurance and a 401(k). And when he got remarried, of course he did it better the second time around. He was more ready for it. I mean, we were so young! Just kids.”

She kept going. There was more to say!

She talked about her parents and her grandmother, the late, great Fionnula, and about her four brothers and their wives. All of her brothers had married their high school girlfriends, and all of Joy’s sisters-in-law still teased their hair the way they had in high school and vacationed for one week each summer on Cape Cod. They favored deep and unhealthy tans, had no problem fighting with their husbands or children in public, and would fall on their swords for any member of their family. The sisters-in-law didn’t understand Joy at all, she told Anthony. Who would move so far from family? Who would get a divorce? Who would let themselves become a single mother?

“I guess I’m sort of the lone sheep,” Joy said. That wasn’t quite right. “The black wolf.” She was mixing her animal metaphors. She blamed that on the Sancerre.

She told him about the first time she took the ferry to Block Island with Maggie to start their new life. She couldn’t work out how to back the car onto the ramp. Everybody else seemed to know how to do it perfectly and she was holding up the other cars. She’d started crying, and a ferry worker had said, “Hey, miss, step out of the car. Let me do it for you.”

“I’m not even sure I should go!” she’d sobbed. In the car in front of her a middle-aged man poked his head out the window to see what the holdup was. If he hadn’t been blocking her way she would have driven off the ferry, back to Fall River.

The ferry worker couldn’t have been more than eighteen, with wide, white cheeks and an official Block Island Ferry hat and the loveliest green eyes. “Of course you should go,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you? You bought your ticket, didn’t you? Come on out, come around, and sit in the passenger seat so your girl doesn’t get scared. I’ll back you up.” Thinking about it now, Joy could have cried. “The kindness of strangers, I guess.” The Sancerre was half gone already. The edges of the evening were going from softly blurred to downright out of focus. She said, “Are you sure you don’t want a small glass?” She pointed at the bottle.

He was sure.

A pall fell briefly over the evening when Maggie called to ask permission to stay overnight at Riley’s. Joy walked into the other room to take the call. “You just spent the night there last night . . . oh, okay, yup, sure, no, I get it.” She tried not to let her deflation show in her voice. Don’t act desperate around your child, she reminded herself. Desperation makes you pathetic, and teens can smell pathetic for miles. Even so, she was astonished by how quickly the tears sprang to her eyes when she thought about Maggie sitting on the couch with Holly and Holly’s husband, Brent, and Riley, watching a movie, perhaps passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth, laughing at the funny parts the way Joy supposed all nuclear families did.