“I do,” said Rebecca (she didn’t). She didn’t believe that it was the temperature. The woman looked to be in some distress. Her dress was droopy and her eyes were droopy and Rebecca could bet that underneath it all her soul was droopy. A divorce was a loss of a high order: not the death of a person, but the death of a union. Esther had turned away from Rebecca to talk to Dawn, and Rebecca leaned closer to the poor broken creature on her right.

“Tequila does that to me too,” she whispered. “I always have seltzer as my second drink. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.”

Sherri with an i said, “Smart,” and gave Rebecca a grateful glance, and Rebecca felt a small, empathetic, recently underused part of herself begin to unfurl.

8.

Sherri

She shouldn’t have ordered the second cocktail. After all, she’d already had the wine at Brooke’s house in the afternoon. But the first one had gone down so easily, especially after the shot, and everybody else was having another one, and the old Sherri could hold a lot of liquor. (She was thinner now, from the stress of the move, less curvy, more of a lightweight.)

Also, she shouldn’t have ordered the surf and turf. She’d been one of the first women to order, and for a moment she forgot where she was, who she was now. She’d never looked at menu prices before; she’d never said no to the best dish in whatever restaurant she was in. By the time she remembered, it was too late.

There were so many different conversations going on—the women had broken off into twos or threes, beautiful heads bent toward one another. She caught little snippets here and there, individual words—camp and horrendous and contractor and eyelashes—but couldn’t find her entrance into any single discussion. She heard someone at the far end of the table say, “We’ll have to get rid of her!” and her blood ran cold.

Only the woman next to her had spoken to her, and it was with such kindness that she felt tears unexpectedly prick her eyes.

She picked up her steak knife and looked at her plate: an eight-inch filet for the turf, and shrimp scampi for the surf. It had been Bobby who introduced her to good steak; when she met him she was familiar only with the cheap cuts: the chucks, the flanks. Bobby taught her about Kobe and tenderloin and porterhouse. He took her to Mastro’s on Sixth Avenue.