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  Nobody looked at me. Almost everyone grabbed coffee to go, and the few people who sat down immediately buried themselves in a newspaper. The woman directly in front of me wore a beautifully cut black suit with shoes that looked as if they would have cost me a month’s salary. She pulled an expensive black leather agenda out of an expensive black leather bag, and examined a page carefully. I wondered what kind of job I’d have to get in order to sit at a Starbucks every morning dressed like that.

  I realized that school hadn’t even started yet. I wondered how the kids would do without me. I hoped the substitute would remember everything I’d told her, that she and June would follow the schedule I’d left. Consistency was so important to preschoolers. I hoped June would be able to handle it if one of the kids melted down because I wasn’t there. I hoped everybody missed me.

  John Anderson stood at my table, holding two cups of coffee. I hadn’t even noticed him standing in line to get them. “Hi, Sarah. Don’t you look nice.”

  “Hi, John. Thanks.” I looked down at my purple dress doubtfully. I looked back up at John. He looked nice, too, kind of casual business with a black leather coat and a gray silk tie that reminded me of old polished silver.

  “Milk and sugar?”

  “Yeah. No. I mean, milk, no sugar. I’ll get it.”

  “Please. Allow me. I’ll be right back.” He put his cup down on the table and walked off with mine. I sneaked another look at him. He looked pretty much like all the other guys in Starbucks. Everybody was well groomed, industrious, more or less good-looking, more or less in shape. As if they all had things to do and places to go and a gym to work out at when they were done.

  So why exactly was I here with John Anderson? Was it just that he’d stumbled upon my not-too-personal ad randomly, and left an equally impersonal message in my voice mail box? Was it simply that I happened to call him back? What if he’d left messages for hundreds, maybe thousands, of women, and I was the only one to answer?

  John handed me my coffee. “Thanks,” I said. “I can only stay for a minute.”

  He made a face, looked down at himself. “What is it, the tie?”

  I smiled. “No, the tie’s good.”

  “You’re sure? I’ve got five or six others in the car if you don’t like it.”

  “What makes you think something’s wrong with you?” I really wanted to know. Maybe then I could figure out why I always thought something was wrong with me.

  “That’s a good question. Maybe it’s just a natural first assumption. Then again, it could be all those years of listening to my ex-wife.”

  “Uh-oh, here we are again. The tales of woe.”

  “Well, we certainly don’t have time for mine this morning.” He smiled and I smiled back. “My bad habits alone could take days. Weeks, even.” He put his elbow on the table and leaned his chin on his fist. He sighed loudly.

  “That many, huh?” I shook my head in mock sympathy. “Okay, just give me one.” I took a sip of my coffee and wondered if the people standing in the take-out line thought John and I were a couple.

  John looked over both shoulders, then leaned forward and whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this, but I’ve been accused of being more than a bit of a dork.”

  “No. You? Oh, my God, you didn’t wear the Indiana Jones hat around the house, did you?”

  “I’m afraid I did. And with white socks, no less.”

  I giggled. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what made it so, but John Anderson was kind of a dork. A nerd. He could drive a nice car, he could get his hair cut on Newbury Street, he could wear a stylishly distressed leather coat. But he was still the guy who sat next to me in advanced math class in high school and wore mechanical pencils in his shirt pocket and had a crush on me. I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him back then, partly because if he liked me, there had to be something seriously wrong with him. But also because if he was a nerd and I went out with him, then I’d be a nerd-lover, which was pretty much the same thing as being a nerd, too.

  All these years later, I imagined the rules had changed. I couldn’t be sure, but John’s residual nerdiness seemed more endearing than not. For the rest of the day, as I tried to stay focused on “Preschoolers and Emerging Literacy,” my thoughts kept drifting over to John Anderson. I pictured him walking around in the Indiana Jones hat and the white socks. Then I pictured him walking around in the Indiana Jones hat and the white socks and nothing else.

  I looked around at the other teachers, by now practically reclining on the padded chairs of the conference room, and wondered if they noticed I was smiling for no apparent reason at all.

  Chapter 12

  Michael and Mother Teresa and I were going for a walk. Borrowing Mother Teresa that time had made Michael think to invite me: “The pooch and I come here a lot. It’s one of our favorite places.”

  Always, since we’d grown up and moved out, I talked to Carol and Christine at least once a week. It was different with the boys. Maybe they were more involved with their wives’ families, but it seemed as if Johnny was always traveling and Billy Jr., even though he was only a year older than Carol, acted as if he were from another generation. The last time he’d shown up for Sunday dinner at Dad’s, he’d worn a gray, button- down sweater and talked about retirement. “I’ll be dead and buried before you bring up that subject again, young man,” Dad said. “My best advice to you is not to rush the seasons.”

  I was happy to have something to do, happier still to have a chance to hang out with Michael. We walked around to the back of Michael and Phoebe’s Toyota 4Runner, and he opened the back door so Mother Teresa could jump down, THE MARSHBURY MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE, read a sign at the edge of the parking lot. A smaller sign was tacked below: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

  Michael put his keys in the pocket of his jeans. We were both wearing sneakers and we set off briskly down a paved road that wound along the side of a fairway. Michael stopped to unhook Mother Teresa’s leash and she galloped ahead. At the edge of a pond, we stepped off the blacktop, tromping across a mixture of beach heather and scrub grass, our sneakers sinking into the sandy soil. “What was this place before it was a golf course?” I asked Michael.

  He stopped, plucked a golf ball from the base of a small cedar. “Nice one,” he said, putting it in his pocket, “practically new. Don’t you remember? This was all a big sandpit. We used to sneak in the back way from Edgewater Road, drive right by the No Trespassing signs, go drinking and skinny-dipping right there.” He pointed to the charming, tastefully landscaped pond.

  “Oh, my God. This was the pond with the shopping carts and car parts at the bottom? Supposedly you’d get polio if you even touched the water with your baby finger, a new kind of polio the vaccine couldn’t prevent.”

  “You didn’t believe that, did you?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “That’s just what the boys said to get you to make out with them instead of swimming.”

  I laughed, even though not a single boy had tried to lure me here in high school. I spotted a ball wedged in the crook of a white birch branch, stood on my tiptoes to retrieve it, handed it to Michael.

  “Can’t keep this one. It’s a range ball.” He tossed it toward the fairway. Mother Teresa ran after it.

  “What’s a range ball?”

  “It means it belongs to the golf course. For use on the driving range. You can tell by the red stripe around it.” Mother Teresa had the range ball in her mouth now. She jerked her head back, threw it up in the air. When it landed, she pounced on it repeatedly, some ancient prey-killing ritual she hadn’t quite evolved beyond. The ball disappeared into her mouth again, and she trotted over to Michael, dropping it at his feet.

  “Good girl,” he said. He picked up the ball, put it into his pocket, patted Mother Teresa on the head. “I’ll have to put it back when she’s not looking,” he whispered. We reached another small paved roadway with two signs. One pointed up a hill and said 9th Hole. The othe
r pointed in the opposite direction and read Pebble Beach 3182 miles.

  We headed up a hill that was so steep I imagined golf carts somersaulting backward down it. Michael and I stopped talking to concentrate on looking for balls. It was a special kind of awareness, scanning the area with slightly blurred vision so that a golf ball would suddenly seem to jump out from where it rested in a pile of fallen leaves or a thicket of briars. Our pockets were bulging. “This is so much fun,” I said. “It’s like an Easter-egg hunt. What do you do with them, save them to golf with in the spring?”

  “I don’t golf. So I keep them in buckets in the garage.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just like having them, I guess. Phoebe says it’s a sickness. She told me I have to either get rid of them all or go get some help.” He grinned at me sadly. “Do you think they have a twelve-step program for golf ball collectors?”

  “They must. Why does it matter to Phoebe?”

  “I think it’s just one more thing for her to dislike about me.”

  “Cut it out, Michael. Phoebe’s crazy about you.”

  “Yeah, right. I don’t think I’ve done one thing to please her in the last five years.”

  “Did you try bringing her here?”

  “Of course I did. I thought it would be romantic. She hated it, said I was ignoring her to look for balls.”

  We’d reached the top of the hill. A small green took up nearly all of the available space. A tiny post-and- rail fence was the only protection from a sharp drop, though the fence looked as if it would be more apt to catch you by the shins and propel you forward than save you from a fall. The view was breathtaking — most of Marshbury, it seemed, and the ocean stretched endlessly beyond. “Is that Old Smokey?” I asked, pointing to the huge hill we’d sledded on as kids.

  “Yeah. Isn’t this the best? If I had to pick one place to stay forever, it’d be right here.”

  A couple of guys were standing around what I presumed was the ninth hole. Both wore hooded sweatshirts with the front center pocket bulging with bumpy golf balls. The look was part derelict, part J. Crew. One of the men was holding a rusty putter, or maybe it was a driver, and two golf balls rested within a couple of feet of the hole. Two open cans of Bud waited on the ground nearby.

  Michael whispered, “They’re part of one of the world’s last remaining indigenous subcultures. Anthropologists are studying them for clues in the search for the meaning of life.”

  Mother Teresa, showing admirable speed for a dog her size, grabbed one of the balls in her teeth, and threw it up in the air. It landed on a can of Bud, which fell over sideways with a glugging sound.

  “Jesus!” one of the guys yelled.

  “That was your beer,” the other one said.

  “Your ball, though, hotshot.”

  Michael bent down to stand the beer can up again. “Shit. I’m sorry, guys.”

  “Rule number one,” said the bigger of the two, “never apologize for anything your dog does.” He turned to me and glared, leaning on the rusty golf club. “Did he spill my beer?” he asked, gesturing to Michael.

  “No.” I smiled nervously. It was starting to get dark.

  “And it’s a damn good thing he didn’t!” he practically roared. Then, holding the golf club horizontally with his arms wide apart, he jumped forward over the club and then backward. He finished with a little tap dance of sorts.

  “Sarah, this is Mitch,” Michael said. “Mitch, my sister Sarah.”

  As I shook Mitch’s hand, the smaller guy reached into his sweatshirt pocket, pulled out three golf balls and started to juggle with circuslike precision. “Balls,” he said, taking off his baseball cap and catching them in it one by one. “You can’t ever have enough of them.”

  Michael shook his head. “This is my sister, Sarah, Jeff. Be nice to her, you two.”

  As I was reaching to shake hands with Jeff, we heard the sounds of an engine straining up the hill. A golden retriever and an Airedale ran by barking, followed by Mother Teresa. Michael grabbed my hand. “Run,” he yelled.

  I ran.

  *

  Michael and I sat in the 4Runner, breathing hard. “I thought you were in good shape,” he said.

  “I was so scared I forgot to breathe.” We laughed. We could hear Mother Teresa panting heavily in the backseat. “What would have happened if we got caught?”

  “Seventy-dollar fine for an unleashed dog.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Seventy dollars is a lot of money.”

  “But we wouldn’t have gotten arrested for trespassing? That wasn’t the police?”

  “No. The dog officer. People who come here to jog or walk sometimes call to report the unleashed dogs interfering with their exercise. Assholes.” He turned his head to the backseat. “Right, Mother Teresa?”

  “I don’t think you should teach her words like that, Michael.” I started to laugh again. “Oh, my God, that was so much fun. Thank goodness you had a flashlight. I can’t believe how fast it got dark. I liked your friends, too, what little I saw of them. Do they live around here?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know their last names. Those aren’t the kinds of things we talk about.”

  “Then what do you talk about?”

  “How many balls we found, how we’re hitting them, if anybody runs into any assholes. Sorry,” he said to Mother Teresa. “Once Jeff, he was the juggler, thought he saw a couple of coyotes out there.”

  “I’m glad you have people to hang out with, Michael. Do you talk to Billy Jr. and Johnny much?”

  “Only when I run into them at Dad’s.” Michael started the car. “Jesus, it’s late. Phoebe’s gonna kill me.”

  We drove quietly for a while and I realized that a part of me hated Phoebe for not appreciating my brother. Michael was sweet and funny and she was lucky to have him. And if she ever said one bad thing about him in front of me, I’d strangle her for him.

  When Michael pulled into my driveway, I asked, “Do you think things ever get better between two people, or do they decide what they’re willing to put up with?”

  “Do you want the happy answer or the sad answer?”

  “I don’t know. Surprise me.”

  “Well, what I’d like to believe is that maybe you get to the point where you can see both sides of things. I mean, sometimes Phoebe has a point. I’m really not that interesting and I forget to notice things a lot.” He put the 4Runner into park. “But then maybe the other way to look at it is that, other than those couple of faults, I’m a pretty nice guy to have around the house.”

  I leaned back against the passenger window and looked at Michael. “So what happens?”

  “Well, I can’t speak for Phoebe, but I know I’ll hang in there. Keep trying. I can’t even imagine leaving. How could you tell your kids something like that? Or anybody else, I guess. Would you ever have left Kevin? I mean, if — ”

  “If he hadn’t left me first? No, I don’t think so. I just figured that was the life I picked, so I had to make the most of it. Sometimes I’m not even sure I deserve a new life now. I mean, I blew it, you know. Maybe that was my only chance.”

  “Where did we get these bad attitudes, do ya think?” asked Michael.

  “The nuns?”

  “Yeah, that works. Let’s blame them.” Michael locked his elbows and pushed off on the steering wheel, stretching his arms and shoulders and yawning at the same time. I yawned in response. “Seriously, Sarah. You have chances now, lots of them. Are you getting out to meet people yet? I’m just going to keep bugging you until you say yes.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What do you mean, you guess so? It’s a yes or a no answer. You’re either trying to meet someone or you’re not.”

  “No, I think you can also be trying to try.”

  Crystal Gale was singing on the radio. Michael turned it up. “I used to think she was singing, ‘Doughnuts make my brown eyes blue.’ ”

  “Don’t they? I d
on’t know, Michael. Sometimes I think I’m missing a few of the essential rules.” We sat listening to the song, joining in with Michael’s version of the chorus, until it was over. “You know that Creedence Clearwater song, the one about there’s a bad moon on the rise?”

  “Yeah, I love that song,” Michael agreed.

  “Well, I always thought they were singing, ‘There’s a bathroom on the right.’ ”

  “It’s not quite as powerful that way.”

  “Michael, what if I say to myself, I’m ready, I want to have a whole new wonderful relationship, and then it never happens?”

  “So what? So then you’re back to square one. And you’re there now anyway.”

  Chapter 13

  “Yellow.”

  “How can I talk to a man who answers the phone that way?”

  “What way?”

  “With a color.”

  “Is that what it sounds like? I thought I sounded like I was in the middle of doing something extremely important when you called.”

  “What, like naming your crayons?”

  “Cute. Very cute.”

  So what if John Anderson had a few quirks. Everyone had something. At least John didn’t bray or snort when he laughed, or I hadn’t noticed it yet if he did. And he was fun to talk to. I realized he was waiting for me to say something. “Well,” I said. “I just wanted you to know that I’d been giving some thought to our second date, just like I promised. Sorry it took me so long.”

  “That’s okay. I eventually tore myself away from pacing circles around the phone and actually went out a few times. I even went to a networking soiree for singles.”

  I felt my heart drop to about knee level. “Oh, good,” I said. “Good for you.” I should have called him back sooner. Instead I’d spent a couple of weeks floundering around in my indecision. Did I like him enough? Would he still like me once he got to know me? If so, what was his problem? And what was mine? Would any relationship I touched go the way of my marriage? Would I bore him to death?

  “A friend dragged me there. I didn’t want to go. What a bunch of whackos.”