Trevor, looking down at his clipboard, now raised his eyes at me. He was one of those people who wrote with their mouths open, and his pale, pink lips had been parted as he filled in the sheet — they shone as if he’d glossed or just licked them. He was a ruddy, freckled, Celtic type, a type that had always put me off a little, maybe because I’d grown up around so many of them. There was something about the barely there pigmentation, the delicate blue veins floating around beneath lacteal skin — his physiology felt too close to the surface somehow, as if it might come bursting forth.

“A lot of changes right now, I imagine.”

“You imagine so,” I answered, which was not really a coherent thing to say.

“Well, you know you can just call the office anytime, let them know what your needs are. And —” Trevor reached behind him and started digging around in his back pocket. “You let me know what I can do, Miss Karie, all right?”

He gave me a business card. I looked at it, expecting to see his full name floating above the Bestlife address, but all that was on the card was one word:

TREV

And a cell phone number beneath it.

I was admiring the confidence of this, an all-caps personality asserting itself amidst a small sea of undifferentiated white, when Trevor snapped me out of it with what he said next.

“Your mother was the best of women.”

I raised my eyes at him, just as he had at me, realizing as I did that — yes — I’d been staring down at his card with my mouth open.

“Thank you.”

“I’m not saying that to be nice. I really want you to know it.”

“I do know it,” I told him.

“I hope you do,” said Trevor. “Because you have some tough decisions coming up, don’t you, Karie?”

As he said this, he poked at the card in my hands.

After my divorce I sometimes used to tell myself, It’s just that I wasn’t used to men. Our father died when I was seven and Kelli was eleven, and our house became a girl-world after that, a doll-strewn universe of floral-patterned curtains and panties flagrantly hung to dry in the living room because there was no father or brother around whose sensibilities needed to be sheltered from such things. I could shriek to my friends on the phone and, later, scream at cute boys on the television and nobody would wince or tell me to keep it down, or announce to me imperiously (as subsequent boyfriends did) that the actor I fawned over was known to be a “major fruit.” My shrieking and screaming would often get Kelli started, and sometimes we’d get into gleeful, eardrum-piercing competitions.

But after my husband left, I would sit in our former home, now half-emptied of whatever furniture and objets he deigned to take with him, and tell myself, like battalions of women had before me, it was the fault of this thing called Men. But it was also my own fault, I thought, for not paying close enough attention to Men, for being cavalier, for not being as careful as other women I knew, women who made their painstaking efforts to understand and negotiate Men as creatures separate from themselves an ongoing project.