“Nice to meet you,” Rebecca had said automatically, even though it wasn’t, not really. She’d been reared on a steady diet of politeness—thank-you notes for every gift, a kind word for any person she ran across—and she’d carried many of these habits into adulthood and tried to instill them in her own children. But manners were thing number 758 that no longer mattered to Rebecca after Peter.

“Oh, hey!” said Esther, who sat on Rebecca’s other side. Alcohol always made Esther’s fair skin flush the color of a spring radish. “I’ve been meaning to say, it’s really too bad, what happened with Alexa and her friends. I heard the three of them don’t hang out anymore.”

Rebecca, startled out of her reverie, was surprised into showing her surprise. “Destiny and Caitlin?” she asked. (Rebecca had been wondering for months what had happened between Alexa and those two, but the answer was somewhere in Alexa’s vault, locked away, unattainable.) “Nothing happened,” she added.

Esther assessed Rebecca’s ignorance too quickly. “Of course not,” she said.

“Why?” Faced with Esther’s knowing look Rebecca had no choice but to ask. “What did you hear happened?”

“Oh my gosh, nothing!” said Esther. “I didn’t hear anything.” She put a hand nervously to her earlobe as if checking for a lost earring. “I just meant—I mean, I heard it had something to do with Alexa’s plans for next year. But you know what? I could be totally off-base. I’m not even sure who I heard that from, now that I think about it. I’m probably thinking of someone else entirely.”

Rebecca concentrated for a moment on the buzzing of the other conversations going on around her. She heard Georgia cry out, with a loud laugh, “We’ll have to get rid of her!”

“Alexa’s plan for next year is to go to Colby.” Rebecca didn’t say as you know, and she didn’t say, obviously, but both were implied. Rebecca would not get caught up in the wasp’s nest of competing agendas. She would finish her scallops, and she would go home, and she would call Daniel to say good night, and she would be asleep by ten thirty.

Then she noticed that the woman on the other side of her, Sherri with an i, didn’t look quite right. Rebecca laid a hand on her arm and said, “Are you okay?”

“Completely fine,” said Sherri. “Really. It’s just a little warm in here, that’s all. Do you feel warm?”

“I do,” said Rebecca (she didn’t). She didn’t believe that it was the temperature. The woman looked to be in some distress. Her dress was droopy and her eyes were droopy and Rebecca could bet that underneath it all her soul was droopy. A divorce was a loss of a high order: not the death of a person, but the death of a union. Esther had turned away from Rebecca to talk to Dawn, and Rebecca leaned closer to the poor broken creature on her right.

“Tequila does that to me too,” she whispered. “I always have seltzer as my second drink. Sometimes I just can’t keep up.”

Sherri with an i said, “Smart,” and gave Rebecca a grateful glance, and Rebecca felt a small, empathetic, recently underused part of herself begin to unfurl.

8.

Sherri

She shouldn’t have ordered the second cocktail. After all, she’d already had the wine at Brooke’s house in the afternoon. But the first one had gone down so easily, especially after the shot, and everybody else was having another one, and the old Sherri could hold a lot of liquor. (She was thinner now, from the stress of the move, less curvy, more of a lightweight.)

Also, she shouldn’t have ordered the surf and turf. She’d been one of the first women to order, and for a moment she forgot where she was, who she was now. She’d never looked at menu prices before; she’d never said no to the best dish in whatever restaurant she was in. By the time she remembered, it was too late.

There were so many different conversations going on—the women had broken off into twos or threes, beautiful heads bent toward one another. She caught little snippets here and there, individual words—camp and horrendous and contractor and eyelashes—but couldn’t find her entrance into any single discussion. She heard someone at the far end of the table say, “We’ll have to get rid of her!” and her blood ran cold.

Only the woman next to her had spoken to her, and it was with such kindness that she felt tears unexpectedly prick her eyes.

She picked up her steak knife and looked at her plate: an eight-inch filet for the turf, and shrimp scampi for the surf. It had been Bobby who introduced her to good steak; when she met him she was familiar only with the cheap cuts: the chucks, the flanks. Bobby taught her about Kobe and tenderloin and porterhouse. He took her to Mastro’s on Sixth Avenue.

“Get whatever you want,” he said to her anytime they went out. It had given him great pride to be able to say that. He beamed like a little boy who’d just tied his shoes for the first time. Mastro’s was the first restaurant, but not the last, that Sherri had been to without prices on the menu. It struck her like a swift blow that she’d have to look at prices, and very carefully, for the rest of her life. She never should have ordered this dish. She had lost her appetite anyway. She cut into an asparagus spear.

We’ll have to get rid of her. No mirth when Bobby said that. Madison Miller was a piece of business that must be attended to, like filling out invoices and managing the fleet of trucks.