The first time Val left Tuscaloosa, Edith expected she’d stay gone. She had not said where she was going; probably she had no plan. There were restless nights picturing her in Boston, reporting Edith’s state to Tessa. Edith would not be pitied. Their breakup had been the right thing—what Tessa and Edith needed to become the people they wanted to be. She was writing and reading. She was buying girl clothes online.

She thought of Val most while going to sleep and waking up. A warm body beside her in bed. Someone to share the morning with. An excuse to cook real food instead of boiling more pasta.

After only two months she came home to find Valerie smoking a cigarette on the front stoop. All Edith could think to say was, You don’t smoke.

Empirically false. Val took a drag.

I’ve never seen you smoke.

You’ve never seen me do a lot of things, babe. Let me look at you. She stomped out the cigarette as she stood. Held Edith’s shoulders. (The same pose of inspection that Tessa would, five years later, greet her with in Boston.) What name are you using now?

I’m sorry? What could be known by looking at her? People shaved their beards, people painted their nails and grew out their hair.

Straightforward question, I thought.

It’s complicated.

Look, if you don’t tell me, I’m going to have to make up a name for you. I mean I can’t exactly call you— Call you Joni, she didn’t say.

Judith. Edith bit her cheek. That wasn’t right; it was all she had. Can we go inside?

Sure, Judy. The cigarette end smoldered as Val bounded up the stairs. Love what you’ve done with the place. Her sheets and pillows were spread across the couch. Three different mugs harbored desiccated tea bags. The coffee table was a mess of books, balled tissues, and unread New Yorkers. Cracker crumbs Hanseled and Greteled their way from kitchen to hall to bathroom. I thought writers just became alcoholics.

All the tissues and half the New Yorkers went into the trash. After a moment’s thought, Edith tossed the mugs in too. I wasn’t expecting company.

I was scoping out abandoned houses in Detroit a few months back. There’s a bunch of people living off salvaged copper. Some of those houses, people have been in and out of for years. They write their names on the walls, or leave behind a balled-up thong. You’d be right at home.

Shut your eyes and keep talking. It’ll be sparkling by the time you’re done.

Valerie had come from New Mexico. I wanted to see The Lightning Field. You need a reservation, so I wasted five or six days trying to flirt my way in. Finally got there and, wouldn’t you know it, no lightning. And I don’t think the guy I slept with really was the assistant director of the Dia foundation. She’d been planning on going north from there to a co-op making nut butters in the shadow of the Rockies—but came to Edith instead. I drove across west Texas for you. It’s the closest I’ve been to home in, hoo boy, years.

How was that?

Fine. I put on My Chemical Romance and drove ninety across the state. I screamed the whole way. I’m probably on a list now.

Oh, Val. You were already on so many lists.

Sweeping crumbs out of the wall-to-wall was a Herculean labor. Edith looked up and found Val’s eyes open.

Who else knows, Judy?

Nobody. She swept more vigorously to no real effect. Nothing to know.

Valerie studied her face again. Hormones?

Not sure I want them.

Sure you do.

She gave up on the crumbs. The dustpan spilled back onto the carpet. You knew. Before I left Boston, you knew.

Judy—­

You don’t have to call me that.

—I think everyone is trans, it doesn’t mean anything.

You could’ve said something.

Valerie laughed—stifled, at first, and then unrestrained. Breathy and wild. A new sort of disarray. Good fucking god, girl.

They cleaned together. Not unlike her body, Edith only noticed her surroundings when someone else was there to pay attention to them.

Still haven’t hung up your posters?

I haven’t decided how to arrange them.

Valerie rolled them out on the gray-brown carpet. She didn’t think long before tacking them around the living room. Here went Egon Schiele’s strained self-portrait, there went the Nan Goldin print of an empty bed. Here were Cézanne’s apples—a housewarming gift Edith’s mother had mailed her—so rich and red that you could feel the century-old juice swelling under their skin.

Why do you have a Radiohead poster?

I’m sorry, did Radiohead stop being good? Are we pretending we’re too cool for that now?

Valerie refused to put it up. Even so, the apartment looked less like a ghoul’s hovel.

Can you believe I’m nobody’s wife? Look at how fucking domestic I am. For pure aesthetics, Valerie had put on an apron. If you put a few plants in here I bet you’d be fifty percent less miserable.

Is this what you do now? A businessman going state to state to visit all your secret families.

How many people do you think I know?

Thousands. Edith’s gesture left a splatter of takeout Thai on the carpet. She dutifully wiped it up.

Val slept in her bed again. Tuscaloosa was the darkest place she’d ever lived. When Val’s hand found its way under Edith’s shirt, three fingers circling the soft down of her back, Edith couldn’t see her face. Couldn’t see whatever need, or hope, or want was in her eyes.

Valerie.

Judith.

Some would call whatever’s about to happen “ill-advised.”

I’m a big girl. I can handle it. That Edith wasn’t talking about her hardly mattered. Val’s body hearth-warm under the covers. Never mind how long it lasted. Everything, Judy. Anything.

Edith kissed her so that she would not say that name—the wrong name—again.