“I have a washing machine,” said Sherri untruthfully. “I just need to wash something big, that’s all.” She smiled a hard, bright smile and turned back to the machine. This was not, she told herself, going to be the quarter that broke the camel’s back.

“Hey, you should come to barre class tomorrow,” said Dawn. “Nine fifteen. A bunch of us go.” She looked again at the washing machine. “Give me your number and I’ll text you the details. If you’re new to town, I’m pretty sure the first class is free!”

11.

The Squad

“She was crawling around on the floor,” Dawn told us later. She said she felt sorry for Sherri Griffin! Scrambling on her hands and knees in the Laundromat for a quarter. Who knew the state of that floor?

(We certainly don’t—we don’t go to the Laundromat.)

“You felt sorry for her, but not sorry enough to walk by and pretend you hadn’t seen,” said Tammy. The conversation stopped for a moment. But that was Tammy for you, you couldn’t always be sure when she was joking and when she was serious.

Dawn and Tammy have never gotten along perfectly; it went back to a beef that Dawn’s daughter Avery and Tammy’s daughter Izzy had back in second grade, smoothed over but never really forgotten. Dawn gave Tammy a look and said she would have been happy to give Sherri Griffin a quarter but she simply didn’t carry cash anymore. And certainly not coins. Everything is credit cards or Venmo these days.

“I told her she should try barre class tomorrow,” said Dawn. “Why not, right?” We used to go to a different barre class, but we’d recently switched. And ever since we’d switched, Rebecca had stopped going. We didn’t know why.

Tammy said, “Okaaaaay,” but didn’t look too happy about it.

12.

Sherri

All through the barre class, Sherri chewed the inside of her cheek to keep herself from screaming. It. Was. So. Hard. And it was the strangest kind of hard. Sometimes you scarcely moved at all, you did strange swingy things with your hips, you picked up teeny tiny weights. But by the time they’d done their damage, you felt like you were holding two four-ton concrete pilings in each hand.

In the first section (“arms”), she thought she was going to throw up. In the second (“quads”), pass out. By the time they got through glutes and abs to the stretching, at the end, she didn’t even have the energy to lie down flat on the mat, the way all the other women were doing. “Savasana,” apparently. She just slunk out the door and made her way on quivering muscles to her car.