Rebecca took a bite of her scallops and thought, I don’t even know these women. She thought, These people are strangers to me. We were thrown together by happenstance, that’s all. Happenstance and geography. These were thoughts she’d been having more and more often lately. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her friends anymore, that wasn’t exactly right—it was that nobody here knew what to do with her sadness after Peter. Immediately after, sure: there was the food and the offers to take over carpools and so forth. But after a time, Rebecca could tell that secretly they thought (and maybe sometimes talked among themselves) that it was about time for Rebecca to get on with it. They wanted the old Rebecca back, the one who planned trips and organized sleepovers. They didn’t understand that that Rebecca was gone forever.
Brooke had invited an outsider to Esther’s birthday dinner, which was clearly vexing Esther, though she was trying her best not to show it. Rebecca considered the new woman, who was sitting next to her. She had seen her on the beach at surf camp, but Rebecca had been on the phone with Daniel for a lot of the morning. Daniel’s brother-in-law was having problems with his daughter, who was thirteen, and Daniel was trying to help him by having her stay with him while his brother-in-law went on a business trip to Cincinnati. Now Daniel himself was having trouble with the girl.
The woman was Sherri “with an i” (that was how she introduced herself, as though the i were of particular value, a bonus). All Rebecca knew about her was that she had a daughter the same age as all of the girls and that she had moved from somewhere (Illinois?) after a divorce.
“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.