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  Joan’s father, Gene Adams, drank because his workday was done. He had been an industrial electrician for fifty years, working at a car manufacturing plant near Detroit, where Joan spent her childhood. His shift, for almost the entire length of his employment, was from seven in the morning until three thirty in the afternoon, with a union imposed, timed half hour for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Joan’s mother, Brenda, was an aide in Joan’s school. She drove Joan and her brother, Carl, to and from school every day, and waved to them every time she saw them in the hallways or the cafeteria. As soon as school was over for the day, Brenda drove the children home. They were expected to do their homework while she prepared dinner. Gene arrived at the house about thirty minutes after his family. He’d walk into the kitchen, kiss his wife as she prepared spaghetti sauce or tuna casserole or meatloaf, and then open the door to the fridge for a beer from the six-pack Brenda had picked up on the way home from school. He would take the first long drink in the kitchen and then set the bottle down on the counter so he could remove his coat. He’d have two more beers before dinner, which he expected to be served promptly at five thirty, and then he’d have three additional beers with and after dinner, finishing the six-pack. And then he’d stop. Later on, Joan surmised that the reason he stopped had a lot to do with the reason she and her brother sat in the car every weekday while their mother ran into the liquor store. Her dad watched television in the evenings, starting with the news. He was in bed and asleep by nine. And this routine seemed to work for him; in five decades, he never took a sick day.

  Occasionally at the dinner table he’d ask his wife or Joan and Carl about her or his day at work or at school. But, for the most part, Gene kept to himself and appeared to think that his wife and children should do the same. Joan used to wonder what went on in his head. She never asked him, however. She hardly ever talked to him. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she knew he preferred not to be disturbed, not to be spoken to unless he initiated conversation. The only time she was sure to get a few words out of him was when she brought home her report card. “My little ace,” he’d say. “You got all the brains in the family.” And then he’d put his arm around her shoulder and give her a quick hug.

  Joan was an academic ace, which was the reason she was admitted on scholarship to the small, liberal arts college on the East Coast, where she met and fell in love with Stephen. She didn’t meet him, however, until the fall of her junior year, which was coincidentally when she decided that drinking six beers a night wasn’t, after all, a wise, healthy, or normal decision. Before that, Joan went to classes, did her homework, went to dinner, and then went to the campus pub. As expected, she met like-minded people at The Attic, a dimly lit, intimate bar on the second floor of the student union building. Her fellow students sat in booths, hunched over their two-dollar pitchers of Budweiser, discussing lectures, sports, the news of the day. From Thursday through Saturday night, The Attic was crowded, standing room only. But on Monday nights, the crowd thinned, giving Joan and her drinking companions the run of the place.

  The spring of her sophomore year, Joan started drinking in the afternoon, before she did her homework, before she went to the dining hall for dinner. She thought this was okay, for a while. And then the students, the fellow drinkers she had been spending more and more of her time with, started talking about leaving school. They weren’t, they’d decided one evening much like all the other evenings, getting much out of it. And Joan might have packed her things and left school, too, if she hadn’t received in her mailbox a handwritten note from her mathematics professor, requesting a meeting. When they did meet, the professor told Joan that she was a gifted student—and then she told Joan that unless she started finishing the assigned homework, the professor would give her an F for the semester. Joan stopped drinking that day. A year later, when she started again, she decided that she would never have more than two drinks, or three when she could get away with it, when she had decided it was somehow warranted, and she would never drink before five o’clock. And she had kept that vow.

  “No, thank you,” said Joan to the casino waitress looking at her expectantly. Joan turned her attention back to the table, where she realized that the small white ball was sitting in eighteen red, the number she had put two chips on. The croupier moved two stacks of chips in her direction. She lost the next two bets, but won three in a row after that. The only other person at the table, a man in an outdated business suit with an amber colored drink at his right elbow, started to put some of his chips on the numbers she chose. The first time their number hit, he smiled at her across the table.

  “Care to join me?” he asked, lifting his drink. “I don’t drink the house stuff. I’ll buy you a real drink.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Wise woman,” he said. “I always know an intelligent woman when I see one.”

  Joan looked at him for a moment and then flashed him an insincere grin before turning her gaze back to the table. She put eight chips on red and eight chips on black and then leaned forward to watch the ball travel around the wheel.

  “Are you a faithful wife, wise woman?”

  This time, Joan didn’t make eye contact with the man. Instead, when she had collected her chips from the ball’s landing on twenty-two black, she told the croupier she wanted to cash in, a phrase she had learned from Jimbo at the fundraising event. The croupier gave her a few larger value chips for her five-dollar chips, and Joan put them in her pants pocket.

  “I didn’t chase you away now, did I?” asked the man. Joan grabbed her coat from the back of the chair. “Now don’t go away mad,” he said.

  Joan raised her eyes to look at him. “How can I be mad?” she asked. “I just won four hundred dollars.” Not breaking eye contact with him, she put on her coat, buttoned up the front, and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. She then shifted her gaze to the croupier. She placed the two chips she had held back on the table and thanked him, and then turned her back to the other man and walked away.

  “I love you!” called the man after her.

  Joan smiled, knowing it was the alcohol and loneliness that fueled his remark. However, she also knew that because she was a sharp dresser, people thought she was more attractive than she actually was. Her clothing somehow hid the extra pounds she carried on her frame. Even so, Joan was no Alice, who was bone thin and in pretty good shape, especially since she had started running again. But Alice had the wizened face of someone five years her senior. And her long blond hair was, Joan thought, silly. Joan, who had been raven-haired since birth, suspected that women with blond hair that fell past their shoulders had a hard time letting it go. They had turned so many heads with that hair over the years. And yet there was something very frightening about viewing from behind a woman with hair down to the middle of her back and then having her turn around to reveal a face that looked like it had been underground for six months. Tales from the Crypt! At that thought, Joan laughed aloud. Giddy about her winnings, she felt like she had been drinking.

  Joan stopped at the cashier windows to cash in the chips given to her by the croupier. The woman behind the bars gave her four crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, Benjamins her daughters called them. She put the bills in a separate sleeve of her wallet, thinking she would use the money to pay for something she normally would not buy. Or, she thought, walking toward the Red Maple parking lot, she could use the money if she ever felt like playing roulette again.

  CHAPTER 16

  Alice, Joan, and Ellie had discussed skipping their second lunch date in December, since life was so busy at holiday time. In the end, they agreed to meet for an hour instead of ninety minutes and to exchange Christmas gifts that cost no more than ten dollars each. To stick to the sixty-minute agreement, they decided to eat at a restaurant that could take their order and deliver their food quickly. It was Alice who suggested, to no one’s surprise, that they try Sensational Salads!

  She was the first to
arrive at the brightly lit eatery, which featured a long display case of standard salad bar fare, like various lettuces, chopped vegetables, beans, and cheeses, as well as ready-mades like tuna, egg, and crabmeat salad, coleslaw, potato and pasta salad and the like. Customers simply chose the plate size they wanted and then, moving their cafeteria-style trays along the slide rail, told the two hairnetted, plastic gloved, tong wielding employees behind the counter what they wanted. Alice had just asked one of the employees if the chicken salad was made fresh that morning when Joan walked up behind her and said, “You must be in heaven.”

  Alice turned around to face her and smiled. “I do like a good salad.”

  “Believe it or not, I do, too. I’m just way too lazy to make anything that looks this interesting at home. So, a place like this is sheer genius. I may take something home to go with our dinner tonight.”

  Ellie, who double checked her watch to make sure she was on time, shed her coat and hung it on the back of the chair next to the one holding Alice’s coat, and then joined the others at the rail. As instructed by Alice, Ellie grabbed a tray from the stack at the near end. As soon as she and her tray reached Joan, she gently bumped Joan’s hip with her own. When Joan gave her an amused and questioning look, Ellie said, “I feel like I’m in middle school again.”

  “But this food looks a whole lot better than what we saw in middle school,” said Alice. She asked for a bed of arugula greens, topped by a mound of chicken salad, a half dozen grape tomatoes, and six slices of avocado.

  “It does indeed,” said Joan, who ordered a mound of tuna, a scoop of pasta salad, a hard-boiled egg, and iceberg lettuce topped with blue cheese dressing.

  “I liked that food,” said Ellie. “Remember the veal cutlet and mashed potatoes?”

  “Fake and fake,” said Joan, paying the cashier.

  “But good fake,” said Ellie. “Hot lunches now are nothing but boiled hot dogs and reheated pizza.”

  “Served with a side salad, thanks to Michelle Obama,” said Alice.

  “I will miss Michelle,” said Joan.

  The three women took plastic ware and napkins from the dispensers at the table beyond the cashier and then walked to the restaurant’s Hydration Station, where they poured water from a metal pitcher into eight-ounce plastic cups. When they reached the table, Joan took off her coat and sat across from Alice and Ellie. “Can I ask the Christmas shopping question now?” Joan asked Alice.

  “You may,” she said. “I finished this morning—well, except for Dave. All I have to do now is bake about a thousand cookies before the girls get home.”

  “When do they get home?” asked Ellie, spearing one of her cucumber slices with her fork.

  “Tomorrow,” said Alice.

  Joan laughed. “Are you picking Linda up at school?”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “She’s got her last exam in the morning. And she wants me there at noon on the dot. Hilary and Cathy, my working women, won’t be home until next week. But they like my cookies every bit as much as Linda.”

  “You’ll have to pull an all-nighter,” said Joan.

  “What smells like smoke?” asked Ellie. “Do you guys smell that?”

  Joan wrinkled her brow and then smelled the sleeve of her sweater. “It’s me,” said Joan. “Sorry about that.”

  “Why do you smell like smoke, Joan?”

  Joan could have told them the truth, that she had arrived at the casino at ten o’clock that morning and played roulette, that she had won, in the end, a hundred dollars, that she had hesitated for a long moment when the costumed waitress asked her if she wanted a drink. Instead, she said, “I left my dress gloves here the night of the fundraiser, and I got bad directions to the lost and found department. I wandered around for what must have been fifteen minutes before I found it. I guess I picked up the smoke smell in my travels.”

  The conversation went back to the children—starting with when Ellie’s sons and Joan’s daughters were due home and how long they could stay. The women then moved on to what everyone would be eating and where all the holiday festivities would be taking place. By the time they finished their salads, they had exchanged a few recipes and last-minute gift ideas for their husbands.

  “Speaking of gifts,” said Ellie, reaching for a bag beneath her feet, “I have something for the two of you.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Alice, retrieving her large leather purse from the back of her chair. Joan, who had put her gifts for her friends under the table that Alice had saved with her coat, lifted her shopping bag off the floor and set it on her lap.

  “Shall I start?” asked Ellie.

  “Please do,” said Joan.

  She handed both of them red foil gift bags, with white tissue jutting out the top. “Open them together,” Ellie said.

  “Wow,” said Alice, pulling a moss green scarf out of the bag. “I had no idea you were a knitter. And this color is perfect for me.” She leaned over and hugged Ellie.

  “This is absolutely beautiful,” said Joan, draping hers, which was gray, around her neck. “I can’t believe you never said a word.”

  “And we never saw you with the bag of knitting that all knitters haul with them wherever they go.”

  Ellie laughed, pleased with their praise.

  “You are good, Ellie,” said Joan, unwrapping her scarf and tucking it back into her bag. “I’m impressed.”

  “And she doesn’t impress easily,” said Alice, making a hitchhiker motion to point to Joan.

  “I’m glad you like them,” said Ellie.

  “And mine goes with my coat,” said Joan.

  “And your eyes,” said Ellie.

  “You are one of the last observant people in the world, Ellie Fagen,” said Joan. “I’m double impressed.”

  “Me too,” said Alice, smiling at Ellie. “Who’s next?”

  “You,” said Joan. “I’m dying to see what kind of surprises you’ve packed into that suitcase you carry around with you.”

  Alice took two square packages, both wrapped in red paper and green velvet ribbon, from her bag and set them on the table in front of Ellie and Joan. “These boxes are pretty enough to be the gift,” said Joan.

  Ellie tugged at the green ribbon. Alice said, “I also want you to open them at the same time.”

  Joan and Ellie removed the ribbon and wrapping and opened the boxes to find a dozen petits fours layered inside, each decorated differently. “Tell me you made these,” said Joan.

  Alice smiled. “I made them.”

  “No wonder you’ve had no time to make cookies,” said Ellie.

  “They are exquisite, Alice.” Joan held out her box. “Do you want one?”

  Alice shook her head. “They are for you,” she said. “My advice is to hide them in the freezer. Share only if you feel like it.”

  “I’m having one right now,” said Ellie, biting in half one that was coated in green frosting and covered with red dots. The moist chocolate cake inside surrounded a cream filling. Ellie closed her eyes. “Incredible.”

  “Okay,” said Joan, “now that we’re done with the homemade portion of the celebration, let’s move on to the store-bought category. I feel like a heel,” she said, handing Alice a flat, rectangular box wrapped in candy cane paper and giving Ellie a short, square box wrapped in shiny, bright green paper. Both boxes were topped with a hunter green taffeta ribbon.

  “You get points for the bow,” said Ellie, untying it and wrapping the ribbon around her fingers. She set the coil aside and then removed the paper. Inside her box were three square bars of handmade goat’s milk soap, which prompted Ellie to say, “How did you remember our discussion about nasty soap in my downstairs bathroom?”

  In Alice’s box were a reflective running vest and a Storm Whistle. Alice smiled at her friend. “After all the grief you’ve given me about running.”

  “Well, now that I know how dedicated you are, I want you to be safe out there.”

  “You went over the limit, pal,” said Ellie.
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  “Says the woman who spent a month knitting us scarves,” said Joan. “Plus, I didn’t. The vest, while brand new, belonged to Cassie, who gave up running after her first run.”

  Alice laughed. “I know how she feels.”

  “And those whistles are supposed to be the loudest ones made,” said Joan, pointing at the box in front of Alice. “You blow it on the running trails, and I will hear it at my house.”

  “I will wear this around my neck every time I run,” said Alice, “starting tomorrow.”

  “No luck yet finding anyone to run with you?” asked Ellie.

  “No,” said Alice. “But Dave keeps promising.”

  “He’ll go with you,” said Joan, nodding her head. “And until he does, you’ve got the whistle.”

  “I do, indeed,” said Alice, checking her cell phone on the table for the sixth or seventh time. “Hey, I’ve got to run. If I’m going to get any cookies done before I get Linda tomorrow morning, I’ve got to start the minute I get home.”

  Ellie and Joan stood as well. All three women put on their coats, stashed their gifts in their bags, and walked out of the restaurant. Neither Alice nor Ellie thought a thing when Joan peeled off from the group, saying she wanted to pick something up for Stephen. They all embraced and wished one another happy holidays. By the time Ellie had arrived at the pet store for her meeting with Diana, and Alice had creamed the butter for her shortbread cookies, Joan was down two hundred dollars and halfway through her first vodka soda.

  JANUARY

  CHAPTER 17

  Ellie and Diana sat side by side at a small table in the tiny, organized office at the back of Diana’s Pet Supply. They had gone over the numbers for the first few months of operations, as well as for Diana’s start-up costs. Ellie told Diana her expenses were in line with her revenue, and that the business would be profitable by March. It was good news for Diana, who had used the profit from a house sale to finance the pet supply store; she was running out of cash.