Mad Martha’s was nothing more than a little cottage on Plum Island, really almost a shack, with just a few tables, the bigger of which patrons shared with other patrons whether they knew each other or not. Katie and Sherri were seated with a family of five on vacation from Durango, Colorado. The food was delectable, and the community table lent the whole experience a jolly, festive air. The Colorado family was chatty. Durango sounded lovely, with a famous railroad that wound through canyons and a national forest. Sherri put it immediately on her mental wish list of places to visit. The list was long and included India and Africa too. Realistically she probably wouldn’t get to any of those. Her pay at Derma-You was twenty dollars an hour, and she wasn’t even working full-time. The waiter was young and nice-looking, with beachy hair, a good tan, an easy smile. Sherri could tell that Katie was smitten, blushing faintly when she placed her order. Watch out for the good-looking ones, Sherri imagined telling her when she was a little older, in a few years’ time. I went for a good-looking one, and look what that got us.

The thing was, Bobby had often been tender and funny. He made a really good pesto sauce. Once they’d played mini golf and he’d crawled through a spiky hedge to retrieve her ball, when she very easily could have gotten a new one from the girl working at the counter. He used to make pancakes for Katie every Saturday morning, which was sort of a cliché of good fathering, but in fact the pancakes were sensational, and he never burned the bottoms. In bed they had an incredible connection—incredible. Sometimes, even now, she flushed when she thought about that. And, worse, she missed it.

The waiter at Mad Martha’s wasn’t even twenty, and it would have been unseemly for a woman of Sherri’s age—a mother! A Derma-You employee!—to let herself be attracted to him. But the glimpse of his bicep, the hollow below his cheekbone when he smiled, his firm, tan calves: all of these things made her wonder something that she hadn’t allowed herself to wonder since she and Katie had first set foot in that terrible motel that smelled like old cheese and despair. What she wondered was this: Would she ever have a man in her life again? Would she ever have sex again? It didn’t seem fair for her to have to give up sex altogether because Bobby had been involved in something so reprehensible. But how, exactly, would it come about, the sex? She lived in a town where everybody seemed already to be coupled off, marching two by two like animals onto the ark. Would she continue to wake day after day alone in the bed in this half-house with only Katie for company?