“Doesn’t matter.” Her voice, tinged with empty gaiety, seemed dragged up from the floor. “You’re welcome, anyhow.”

I followed her inside. She motioned me carelessly toward the kitchen. It was done in instant French country, with new copper pans hanging on the near brick wall next to some butcher knives and assorted utensils that I guessed had never been used. She sat behind a butcher-block counter with an ashtray and the same blender full of daiquiris, patting the barstool next to hers. “Sit,” she commanded.

I sat, surveying the damage. With the blue beneath her eyes not quite purple, the veins of her nose not quite burst, she was a wreck-in-process, not quite finished. She tapped some ash off a cigarette that lay burning in the ashtray—the ladylike gesture of some thinner, more fastidious person trapped within the sagging body—and peered at me. “Want a drink?”

I nodded reluctantly. “Sure.”

She pointed toward the cupboard. I took the smallest tumbler and half filled it, sitting back down beside her. She watched my drink until I took a sip. It tasted sick-sweet. Her smile was bemused, as if summoned by distant laughter. “I’ve always hated the taste,” she said. “You hate it too, don’t you?”

“When it makes me feel like less.”

She nodded solemnly. “You mean the waves. You have to keep drinking ’til the tide comes back in.”

“It always goes back out though, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, dammit.” She stared at the blender. “Why did you come?”

“To talk.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

I turned to her. “You.”

The smile she managed seemed stolen from time, the almost flirtatious smile of a pretty girl with a present behind her back. Thirty years ago the smoke of early womanhood would have shown in her hazel eyes, and the delicate nose and chin would have made her pretty. But now harsh sunlight through the window exposed bleached hair and the puffiness of drink, and her smile was the last relic of a widowed sexuality, sad as a stained-glass window in a slum. “More daiquiris?” she asked.

“Sure. I was wondering why you drink so much alone.”

“Or drink so much, period.” She filled my glass. “It’s not by choice.”

I raised my drink. I would have hated myself even without the hangover. “What were we talking about?” she asked.

“Your husband.”

Her smile faded. “It wasn’t always like this. Not at the start.”

“Then you’ve been married a long time.”

She nodded. “Twenty-nine years—thirty next June thirteenth. We were both eighteen and ran away just out of high school. I put him through school at Alabama.” She looked joylessly around their overdone kitchen. “It’s funny. The hardest times are the best. He was so straight and serious and handsome then, and we were together.”

“That’s too bad—that it changed, I mean.”

“He changed.”