It was a kind turn of phrase. He hadn’t had hair in my lifetime. In the booth directly across the restaurant, nothing between us but miles of black and white tile, a lone man was reading a newspaper but really watching us. I’d noticed him when we’d arrived. A thick paunch rode over his waistband. If he’d been much sadder, he’d be flat on a pavement somewhere. He made me cross my legs, and not in a pleasant way.

I told her I did. “He’s been looking over here pretty regularly.”

“Very good,” she said, pleased. “I have this idea he might be lonely. I bet he’d love to buy a girl like you a nice breakfast. Maybe you walk those 34Ds over there and see what he says.”

But my face—I’d been crying, I hadn’t slept, I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

“You’ve probably looked better,” Lou said. Another thing to like about her: kind honesty. “But so what? He’s no prize himself.”

It was true, but I’d thought only of the way he’d see me, not how he’d want me to see him. As my savior. My hero. And then Lou said something that stuck with me, even years later when I’d developed my own style, so separate from hers you’d never guess Lou trained me, that she taught me everything I knew—I was that good; I took to it that completely. Three years before all that, Lou said to me:

“You’d be shocked how many men want to save a wounded woman. For a certain kind of man, the worse you can make that pretty face look, the better.”

I made my way over to him, trying to channel the hypnotic way Lou had walked through the parking lot. I forced myself to think of figure eights and the dance of Salome and the push and pull of the tide until I had a handle on the rhythm. Everything was manufactured and self-conscious then.

For so long, I’d tried to be the woman my lover wanted me to be. I did it quietly, taking down notes in my head of what he liked, what he didn’t. If he smiled when I cooked, I Betty Crockered him with mountains of muffins until he couldn’t button his pants. If I held on to him too hard and he became allergic to my touch, I backed away for weeks, pretending that my every surface was made of ice and one hot touch would melt me dead. It didn’t matter if this was my death by a thousand paper cuts. I could be better. I could be perfect. If I noticed the right things, I could learn to be exactly who he wanted.