If Owen was going to make a serious move on Imogene, he needed to be quits with Vanessa. But would he ever find another woman like her, such a frank sexual friend, so unblinkingly frontal, with such imperturbable matte skin and a clitoris that functioned like a prick, doing the attacking for him? The same effrontery and energy made her locally omnipresent; she was co-chairperson, as they called it, of the fund drive to build an annex—more office space, less for doctors than for the proliferating administrators and bookkeepers of health insurance—on the United Falls Hospital, which was located in town but also served the rude hamlet of Lower Falls and those residents of semi-suburban Upper Falls who did not want to make the drive into Hartford. Most everyone wanted to see the local institution thrive and survive, as medical costs and the efficiencies of greater volume were thinning out small-town hospitals—the same economic trends that were exterminating small-town movie theatres and unaffiliated banks and independent office-supply stores, toy stores, and book shops. Shopping had shifted to the areas between towns, to malls that gobbled up several farms at a time. Even the gold-lettered Woolworth’s, the sundries-packed River Street outpost of a corporate empire as presumably enduring as the Ford Motor Company and American Tel and Tel, had become depressing: only a few muttering, demoralized parakeets and canaries remained in the pet section, which once had twittered like a jungle, alive with the husky odor of birdseed and droppings and with the rustle of gerbils in their squeaky wheels and pungent nests of wood shavings.