She turned her bright blue eyes to me. “Unh-unh, Tess. You put yourself out there and I know, seein’ as for the last three months there’s been no talk, no sightings, Jake Knox all of a sudden fell off the face of the earth.” She leaned into me. “I know.” Then she leaned back. “It’s ended. Because off you go, hell-bent on whatever you’re hell bent on.”

She turned back to the girls and kept going.

“Suddenly, after twenty-five years of me talking to her about it, she gets contacts. Suddenly, she’s at kickboxing classes three days a week. Suddenly, she’s looking at places to open a new bakery and expand her business at the same time she’s put the house she loves on the market and is waxin’ on about movin’ to Kentucky. Suddenly, she’s off to a new hairdresser, spends three hundred friggin’ dollars for a new friggin’ look. Suddenly, she’s not shopping at Nordstrom’s but scrounging through the racks of Biker Babes ’R’ Us.”

Martha settled back on her heels and kept right on talking.

“Now, we all know, a girl gets dumped by a serious hot guy she’s got two options. She deposits her ass at the nearest LaMar’s and steadily eats her way through the inventory until she’s gained fifty pounds and gives up on men until she finds herself a beer-bellied loser who worships the ground she walks on. Or she gets herself a new look, kickboxes her way to a new ass, and throws herself into her job. That means she’s living and breathing for that moment when she sees him again and she can say, ‘Look what you gave up, asshole.’ ”

Martha’s eyes came back to me.

“And that’s what you’ve been doin’.”

That wasn’t what I was doing.

Or not exactly.

“Honey—” I began again only to get cut off again.

“But today, I see it in your eyes. Something is up and my guess is that something is that guy’s back. You’re in your head again, livin’ the dream that he’s going to be all you want him to be when everything about him screams he… is… not.”

“Tell it like it is, sister,” Elvira encouraged.

“Um… not to be rude or anything, but…” I looked at the girl gang. “I don’t really know you all and maybe—”