“Except I brush my teeth with a regular old Oral-B,” Panda said, and then there was a pause. She made them wait for it, but I got there first and felt a bubble of shocked laughter rising. “Only Francis brushes with the battery-powered kind.”

Then they were all laughing like a pack of jackals, covering my own laughter. Poor Francis! I would never be able to look at his lovely white teeth in the same way again.

“Oh, my God,” Lavonda said, lifting her plastic cup. A good inch of clear liquid sloshed around in the bottom. “You got me. You have the lead.”

“Tate?” Roux said, lofting her own glass. “I don’t think you can beat that. Drink.”

“Hold on!” Tate said, sitting up very straight. Panda never beat Tate at anything. Tate leaned in. “I frenched a guy last week. Not my husband. Boom, bitches. Why don’t y’all drink to that.”

The hilarity drained instantly. Silence from Panda. Silence from Lavonda. I found myself stepping in closer.

“Who?” Panda said, and there was such outrage in her voice that even sloppy-drunk Tate seemed to hear it. “Who was it? Someone we know? Someone’s husband?”

Tate backpedaled. “God, no! No one you know.”

I did not believe this.

“Well, that wins,” Roux said, wry, and drained her cup.

Panda and Lavonda were still staring at Tate.

“You let him?” Panda said.

Tate said, “No, no, I pushed him right away. I guess I . . . felt sorry. He was saying how his wife was pregnant and she was being the sex camel. I felt bad for him, you know? He misread it, and he tried something. I shut it down. Of course. Not a big deal. Panda wins. Here, I’ll drink.” She guzzled at her cup.

I was reverberating with a second shock. Pregnant? Did she mean Charlotte’s husband? Surely not. The world was full of pregnant women. Just because Char was the only pregnant person in our neighborhood right now, it didn’t mean Tate had started something up with Phillip Baxter.

“Who was it, Tate?” I had to know. I couldn’t stand here, passive, eavesdropping. Tate turned her head to peer at me with owlish eyes. I don’t think she’d realized I was back until that moment. Her eyes widened, and her face flushed a deep, dark red. Panda and Lavonda were her inner circle, but I was Charlotte’s. Tate couldn’t look away from me, and I could see drunk wheels spinning in her head.

“Just a guy I met . . . um, at the car place. We were stuck in that waiting room, and we got talking,” she said, overloud, looking right at me, and she was lying.

“It’s just a game, y’all,” Roux said, getting up. “Panda won. Come join us for the next round, Amy.”

She walked toward me, slow and slinky, like a parody of a fifties housewife, carrying a glass with a shot of gin at the bottom.

I couldn’t look away from Tate, who was now aiming her eyes anywhere but at me. She told Lavonda and Panda, “He got the wrong idea. They shunt’ve named that place Quickie Lube,” and Lavonda snorted and laughed, reassured. I didn’t. I wasn’t. It was Phillip. She had done something with my best friend’s husband. I knew it even before Tate peeped at me to see if I’d been taken in by her weak lies and her joke.

I said, “This game? It doesn’t seem all that fun to me,” to Roux, but I held my gaze level and serious on Tate. She flushed and looked away fast.

Roux sidestepped between us, blocking my view. “It’s a blast. You should play. It’s like Never Have I Ever, but for grown-ups. We skip the coy denials and go right to confession. You start by telling everyone the worst thing you did today.”

That last sentence made me feel as if Roux were running one overly cool, lacquered nail tip down my naked spine. It straightened me into Good Girl posture, shoulders back and down, eyes widened into instant innocence.

“Sure. I’ll play,” I said quietly, to Roux alone. “The worst thing I did today was let you get this pack of harpies drunk in my house.”

Roux laughed and waved away my entry. “We’re past that round now.”

Over at the coffee table, Tate said, “Let’s keep going! Lavonda, what’s the very worst thing you did last month?”

I felt Roux watching my reaction. I asked her, sharp, “Last month?”

Roux shrugged.

“No, but wait, were you flirting with the car-place guy? If it was all him, why is it your worst?” Panda asked with dogged, drunken logic.

Tate said, “I must have been putting out a signal, is why it’s my worst. But, like, for real, unconsciously.”

“Women blame themselves,” Lavonda said, trying to smooth it over. “But it’s the man. It’s the penis. It’s the man penis that causes all the troubles.”

“Last month?” I repeated, gaze fixed on Roux. “You said it was a game about today.”

Roux said, “Round one was today. I won it. This was round two, where we all told the worst thing we did last week.”

Last week meant the beer-soaked Back-to-School party Tate had hosted around her pool, I remembered, trying to do infidelity math inside my head. Davis and I had made a brief appearance with Oliver, while Maddy stayed the whole time, basking and splashing with the small pack of neighborhood teens. Char had been there, plopped miserably in a deck chair, sipping ginger ale and eating saltines. Her husband had been pounding down the Rolling Rocks, and Tate’s husband had been micromanaging the brats on the Big Green Egg. With Phillip drunk and Tate unsupervised, I hoped for Char’s sake it had stopped at just a kiss. But I couldn’t worry only about Char right now. Right now I could barely breathe.

“And then round three is . . .” I heard myself saying in an airless voice.

“You say the worst thing you did last month, and if yours is the most awful, then everyone else has to drink,” Roux said, eyes on mine, unblinking. “Then we tell the worst things we did last year. And so on.”

The three drunken furies at the coffee table were bickering now, locked in their own tension. It rendered them oblivious to ours, but I felt it. Our tension was a long, lithe ribbon winding around us. It squeezed in, cold-blooded and well muscled, binding the two of us together.

“Ish the penis that starts it, but sometimes the vagina can send a signal,” Lavonda pontificated.

“What kind of signal?” Panda said. No doubt wondering if Tate’s vagina was signaling her own very tasty husband. But no, Tate had it aimed at Charlotte’s.

But all I could manage right now was asking Roux, “How many rounds? How far does it go?”

“Oh, come on, Amy. A good game has to go all the way,” Roux said, and her pink tongue came out for just a moment to touch her pale upper lip. “Think back. What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

Somehow that rocks glass was in my hand. She’d put it in there, or I’d taken it. I felt the rim at my mouth. From a distance I observed One-Drink Whey slamming down a shot of room-temp gin. But I needed the heat. My whole body had gone corpse cold.

I couldn’t make sense of the angry words the others were saying now. It sounded like cats hissing and growling around my near-empty bottle of Hendrick’s. Their sound faded as Roux leaned in, close. Intimate. Like she had a secret to share, and I was leaning as well. As if I wanted to hear it.

“You don’t want to play? That makes no sense,” she said, and her spirit animal was a more sinister version of the Cat in the Hat. Hers was feral, invading to unpack trouble in a house where no mother would ever come home. In this house I was the only mother, and I had let trouble in. I’d swung the door wide for it, hoped it had the right house, even. “Because, Amy? C’mon. You would win this. I’m thinking you got these low-stakes bitches on lockdown.”

“Get out,” I said, soft, a thousand underwater yards beneath the drunken, sniping women on my floor around my coffee table.

Roux heard me, though. She was down here with me, standing exactly as she had when I first saw her on my porch, head tilted, hip cocked. She spread her hands palms up, and I was shot through with a painful feeling that was akin to pleasure. Her hands were not empty after all. They were holding my history, invisible but so very heavy. I could almost see it in her hands.

“Oh, yeah. You would win.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but I was still leaning toward her, as if I wanted more. At the same time, her sentences ran through my mind in triplets, like the first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, played poorly in a minor key. You’d win this. You’d win this. You would win. Every sour chord telegraphed itself on my numb face. Guilty, and she saw it.

“Come by my place. Soon. We have a lot to talk about,” Roux said.

“Get out,” I repeated, and she brushed past me to the stairs.

I turned to watch her rise. Behind me I could hear Tate retching and Lavonda saying, “Oh, shit, grab that trash can!” and Panda crying out, “Oh, no!”

I wanted to run up the stairs after Roux, chase her to the front door and drive her out, bolt it, draw the chain. But it would do no good. She’d cracked open the past. I could feel it leaking into my bloodstream, spreading like a toxin through me. She’d brought interesting times. She’d let them loose inside me.

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