Vivian allowed her hostile fury to settle and fester just below the surface, while plastering on a tight, bright smile on the outside, lined in Revlon’s Fire & Ice red lipstick.

“Fine, thank you!” was the automatic response to anyone asking how she was doing, or how her day was, or even just commenting on the weather.

“Sunny day today, isn’t it?”

“Fine, thank you!”

That next week, she made breakfast like she always did, she dressed and went to work like she always did, and she listened to the phone calls like she always did. But she wasn’t listening for everyday Wooster gossip anymore. The people could take their precious quilts, forgotten wallets, and trips to the A&W and just stuff them. Vivian was waiting for, and dreading, any calls that would expose her. How did she know it would happen through a telephone call? Who was to say people weren’t getting together in person right now and talking about her? The truth was, she didn’t really know. But it was December, it was cold, and it was right before Christmas and people were busy with their families. If only she didn’t have to leave the house.

Every outing to a public place was now a test of nerves for Vivian. Who had Betty Miller told? Who knew? Who was talking about her behind her back? Every greeting was approached with cautious suspicion, every look was met with defensive, phony cheer.

“Fine! Thank you!”

A trip to Buehler’s used to be a social opportunity wrapped in a grocery errand. She used to proudly parade down the aisles of the store, mentally ticking off everything she knew about everyone she saw. There’s Ann Metcalf; her father is in a nursing home and she doesn’t want to visit because she can’t stand the smell. There’s Stewart Bowen’s wife, whatshername. She’ll have to go easy on the groceries because Stewart just lost his job.

But now the trip to Buehler’s was a tiptoe onto a minefield, because everyone at the grocery store might know about Vivian. She was terrified, and therefore overcompensating. She spent fifteen minutes more on her hair and twenty more on her makeup before walking out the front door of the Dalton house, as if extra layers of Spray Net and Max Factor Pan-Cake foundation could protect her from the judgment and scorn of Wooster. Hair like Bette Davis, teeth like Joan Crawford. She was doing the best she could. The dresses, sweaters, and shoes she usually reserved for special occasions, like weddings and holiday gatherings, were now in regular rotation for work, Christmas shopping at Freedlander’s and Dari-Land, and grocery shopping at Buehler’s.

“To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,” a stony-faced Vivian chanted to herself, with her jaw set and her breath puffing out before her in the car as she drove. “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.” That was all it would be. A quick trip, there and back. For the market today, she’d chosen the cornflower-blue Dacron poly-and-wool-blend dress, McCall’s pattern #9150, which she’d sewn herself, with the faux-pearl earrings and rhinestone rooster brooch. Cock-a-doodle-doo! The blue of the dress matched the color of her eyes, just like Wallis Simpson’s dress would have, back in the days of carefree romance and stupidity. If she didn’t happen to run into her dinner guests at Buehler’s, she’d wear the same dress that evening, with her black patent-leather pumps, instead of the worn-out ankle boots she had to wear to get through all the goddamned snow.