Mrs. Fletcher(29)

Me and Bobby, she thought. Bobby and me.

It was a ridiculous idea, but just plausible enough to make her laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head, as if it wasn’t worth explaining. “It’s stupid.”

“You have a nice laugh,” he told her.

They went back inside, into her childhood bedroom. The walls were pale pink, with ghostly rectangles where posters used to hang, but it all looked the same color by candlelight. He sat on the edge of her narrow bed and watched her undress.

She made a little striptease out of it, undoing the buttons on her dress one by one, very slowly. He was a good audience.

“Oooh yeah,” he said, more than once. “You are fucking gorgeous.”

The dress fell to the floor. She stood there for a moment in her black bra and panties, along with the knee-high boots she’d tugged on for the occasion. He nodded for quite a while, as if something he’d long suspected had turned out to be true.

“You’re killing me,” he said. “You are totally fucking killing me.”

As far back as she could remember, Amanda had had mixed feelings about her body. She was shorter and heavier than she wanted to be, with big, full breasts that weren’t great for yoga or running, but made a very positive impression in situations like this.

“Oh Jesus,” he muttered, as she dropped her bra on top of the dress. “Look at those fucking tits.”

Standing next to Trish Lozano in the harsh light of the changing room, Amanda had felt the way she had all through high school, chubby and dull and hopeless. But right now, shimmying out of her panties in the trembling yellow light, with Bobby studying her like a painting in a museum, she felt like something special.

“Want me to keep the boots on?”

“Whatever’s easier,” he told her. “I’m good either way.”

*

Eve wasn’t sure a Manhattan qualified as a “Fancy Cocktail,” but it was close enough that she felt entitled to check off a second box on her Going Solo checklist. And besides, even a simple Manhattan seemed plenty fancy for the Lamplighter Inn, which was the hands-down favorite dining spot of Haddington’s senior citizens, who’d been holding their annual banquet here since time immemorial.

Eve would have been fine with never eating another iceberg wedge or fillet of sole at the Lamplighter for as long as she lived, but she had a soft spot for the bar, a cozy hideaway with red leather stools and a half-dozen booths that would have been perfect for a romantic nightcap, if there’d been any romance in her life. At eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening, it was pleasantly uncrowded without seeming desolate, only four other people at the bar—a grimly silent older couple who looked like serious drinkers, and a pair of blue-collar guys watching a ballgame on the muted TV. One booth was occupied as well, by two women engaged in an emergency heart-to-heart discussion.

“Do I know you?” the bartender asked. He was a nice-looking guy around her own age, with close-cropped gray hair and an appealing residue of boyishness in his face. “Aren’t you Brendan’s mom?”

Eve admitted that she was. The bartender held out his hand.

“Jim Hobie. I was his soccer coach way back when. He must have been in kindergarten or first grade. Our team was called the Daisies.”

“Oh my God,” Eve laughed. “I forgot about the Daisies. They were adorable.”

In the earliest phase of youth soccer, all the teams were coed and named after flowers, and nobody kept score. That lasted for two years, and then things got cutthroat and stayed that way.

“It was pure chaos,” Hobie told her. “Brendan was the only kid on our team who knew what he was doing. A couple of times we had to tell him to stop scoring goals and give everyone else a chance.”

Eve studied the man’s face, trying to place him on the sidelines of those long-forgotten Saturday mornings.

“I thought Ellen DiPetro was the coach.”

“I was her assistant,” Hobie explained. “I had more hair back then, and a little goatee, if that rings a bell.”

Bells were not ringing, but it was a long time since Brendan had been a Daisy.

“You had a kid on the team?”

“My daughter. Daniella.”

“Daniella Hobie. That sounds familiar.”

“She was salutatorian,” he said proudly. “Gave one of the speeches at graduation.”

“That’s right.” It was a very long and boring speech, if Eve remembered correctly, about all the wonderful lessons she’d learned from participating in the model U.N. “How’s she doing?”

“Great. She’s a freshman at Columbia. Seems to love it.”

“Wow. An Ivy Leaguer. Good for you.”

“She didn’t get it from me,” Hobie assured her. “I barely squeaked through Fitchburg State.”

“Maybe she got it from her mother.”

“I don’t think so. Her mom—my ex—didn’t even graduate. Though I guess that was mostly ’cause I got her pregnant.” He shrugged, like it didn’t really matter. “I just think Dani was born smart. I could see it in her eyes when she was a little baby. Like she was just taking it all in, you know? Figuring it out. Our son—her older brother—he was nothing like that. He spent about a year trying to swallow his own fist. That was his big project.”