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It was a spectacular piece of work. Adam should have been proud of it, because
I
was proud, even as I was furious. He should have shared it with me—should have shared the others, too, so I could have buoyed him up and encouraged him to own this gift he had, rather than hiding it in favor of some phony pretense of literary preciousness. I should have been supporting him, not wallowing in ignorance. But he'd thought I'd be disappointed. He hadn't trusted me. He hadn't let me in.

I'd thought nothing could hurt more than the affair. I was wrong.

I officially marked the Friday before Labor Day as the end of the fifth week of my separation. New York's requirements stated simply that the marriage must have been over for at least six months and could not be saved. “Could not be saved” was something of a matter of opinion—my opinion, specifically—but the time frame was reassuringly factual. As of January 28 of next year, I would be eligible to file. It felt simultaneously way too far away and way, way too close.

“Does your lawyer need me to sign anything?” said Ruby, a couple of hairs too eagerly. She'd been unaccustomedly solemn when I told her I had decided on a divorce, and reassured me that I was doing the right thing. “I can vouch for the fact that Adam hasn't lived here since I arrived.”

“Ehh, I haven't called a lawyer yet. I'm not sure I'm ready to make it quite that official.”

“But what about all the financial stuff, and the house, and—”

I cut her off with a quelling look. “Yeah.
Really
not ready to tackle that.”

She shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Which, I decided, was not a bad mantra for me to live by when everything I'd counted on about my relationship had been turned upside down. If anything so much as came within range of making sense—“fair enough” it would be.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

—E. B. White to Mr. Nadeau, March 30, 1973

“You're out of milk,” said Jonathan, in a tone of bemused condemnation. “You maniacs have seven different kinds of cereal, but somehow you are
out of milk.
”

He was standing in front of my refrigerator, the doors flung wide and the whitish glow from the interior reflecting on his sharp profile and his Sugar & the Hi-Lows T-shirt.

“Let's be honest, the milk is really just a substrate,” said Ruby. “Water works equally well.”

“It absolutely does not, and that's disgusting. First item on your list:
milk.
Then we need to get some vegetables into you two. You're basically one step away from scurvy.”

“Arrr, me hearties,” said Ruby.

“This is your fault, right?” he said, spinning to face her. “Care usually eats like a functional human being.”

“Well, I've never left my husband before,” I said. “Don't they say when the going gets tough, that's when you find out who you really are?”

“I don't think they were talking about breakup eating, darlin'.” He closed the refrigerator doors with a sigh. “All right, let's hit the market.”

Jonathan at a farmers' market is like—well, in order not to say it's like a kid in a candy store, let me say it's like a gold digger in a jewelry store. He invariably overbuys, much like he over-orders anytime we're out for a meal; he just has to try everything. But it was fun to follow him from stand to stand, laughing as Ruby mimicked his painstaking sorting through a sprawling pile of salad greens, feeling the afternoon sun on my face and the breeze toying with my hair. Just for the hell of it, I bought some beautiful amber-gold honey and a brick of homemade lavender soap. Pausing at a table overflowing with yellow, red, burgundy, and green heirloom tomatoes, I marveled at the heavy weight of them in my hand. What the hell, maybe I'd try growing a few things of my own next summer—there'd be no Adam to tease me if I screwed it up.

When we returned from the market, Ruby and I dropped the bags on the island and began unloading them, while Jonathan plugged his phone into the speaker and clicked over to the playlist he wanted. It was a long-standing rule: When he cooked, he got control of the tunes. Mouthing the lyrics to the song, he started to prep the ingredients for his marinade, moving around my kitchen like it was his own. I handed him the garlic and the thyme, which he set to work mincing, then uncapped the bottle of olive oil and glugged a healthy pour of it into his favorite stoneware mixing bowl. He liked that bowl because it was clean, white, simple. Heavy enough to stay put from its own weight, not tippy like a stainless one.

The strange and unwelcome thought pushed in that, at this point, I'd have to say I knew Jonathan better than I knew my own husband. But of course, Jonathan himself would find it creepy that I was taking inventory. I wondered what little pieces of mystery he was holding back from me, his closest friend. The fact that he'd thought about kissing me before had certainly been a new one.

It was the first time we had seen each other since that day, and things were…fine. We'd been friends for way too long to have our orbit misaligned by one glancing asteroid blow. We'd agreed to avoid a repeat of any weirdness in the future. Yet still it pricked at me, this physical awareness of him I'd never had before. I knew what that beautiful hair of his felt like between my fingers. Knew what my lower lip felt like when he grazed it with his teeth.

“Don't you need to measure anything?” said Ruby. “To make sure it has the right balance?”

Jonathan smiled and sliced a lemon in half, then juiced it through a strainer into the bowl. “Pretty sure I could make a grill marinade in my sleep.”

“Duh, Ruby,” my sister said, rolling her eyes. Ruby's ability to poke fun at herself for a flat joke or a dumb comment has always been one of my favorite traits about her. I aspire to it myself. “Here, let us help you chop the veggies,” she said, grabbing an onion and diving her knife into it. Lengthwise. I took a breath and started counting.

Jonathan made it to four before he couldn't take it.

“Hey, you know what? It's better if you cut them horizontally. Like so, see? They hold together better on the grill.”

“Oh,” said Ruby. “That makes sense.” She sliced the rest of her onion into perfect quarter-inch-thick rings, then leaned forward to grab a zucchini from the farmers' market loot. “What about zucchini—do you think I can handle that?”

I made a snorting noise as Jonathan gazed at her blankly. Then he glanced from me, helplessly dissolving into giggles, to Ruby's artificially innocent smile, and shook his head.

“Assholes,” he muttered. “Tell me again why I'm cooking dinner for you?”

“So we can feed your ego by praising you,” Ruby said.

“Yeah, that'll do,” he said, grinning. “Hey Care, pick us a bottle from Adam's stash. Something expensive.”

Afternoon drifted into evening, and as the sun glazed the grass with gold between the stretching blue shadows of the trees, we sat in a row on the back porch sofa, drinking the wine while the veggies cooked on the grill. After the first bottle, Ruby went to the kitchen and emerged with a refill clutched in one fist. She plunked down into her spot to the left of me, raised the bottle, and swigged directly from it.

“Why stand on ceremony?” she said, wiping her lip as Jonathan and I gaped at her.

“Gross,” I said, and Jonathan started laughing.

“What, are you worried about backwash? I heard that's not really a thing. Or maybe it was double dipping that's not really a thing. Whatever. Here, Blaster, you have some.”

It dawned on me, as I lowered the wine bottle from my lips a few minutes later and passed it to Ruby, that this was the best time I'd had in a very long time. Before this visit of hers, I had forgotten what pure fun it could be to spend time with my sister. And I didn't know how I could have forgotten a thing like that, except that I had a vague but persistent feeling it had something to do with Adam.

“Care, can you grab me some plates? We're almost ready to go here.” Jonathan rolled the lid of the grill back, and a deliciously scented puff of smoke billowed into the air.

But before I could snap my attention back to the present, Ruby skipped into the kitchen, then reappeared laden with plates, silverware, and my favorite vintage linen placemats and napkins. She refilled each of our wine glasses and positioned the bottle in the middle of the table with the dying sunlight illuminating its brilliant green depths.

“Wait,” she muttered, and evaporated again, returning bearing a small, roughly glazed gray ceramic jar with a few stems of maroon and orange daylilies in it. I'd forgotten I even had it, let alone where I'd put it, but it looked unexpected and wonderful holding the boldly colored lilies. She placed the jar in the center of the table and then climbed onto my bench, shooting down at the table with her iPhone camera.

“Ruby, what are you doing?” I said.

“The table looks so pretty,” she said, a defensive note in her voice.

“Hey, Martha Stewart, sit your butt down and eat,” grumbled Jonathan, setting a plate down at the spot closest to her. “Ain't gonna cook for you again if you let my food get cold.”

She dropped onto the bench and speared a hunk of swordfish with her fork. “Oh my god, this is delicious,” she mumbled, eyes closed with bliss. “Seriously, Jonathan, this is amazing.”

And she was right. It was heavenly. Cooked to the perfect degree of tenderness and bursting with flavor. “Blaster, you've done it again,” I said, saluting him with my wine glass.

“You're gonna have to stop calling me that,” he said, lifting a finger from his glass to point at me. “I'm only doing serious dating now. You're looking at a reformed man.”

A small starburst of jealousy exploded inside me. “Wait, are you seeing somebody?” I squeaked. “You didn't tell me!”

“No. But when I do, it's gonna be legit.”

I waited a beat, pointedly. “Yyyyyyyyokay. Whatever you say.” Come to think of it, I wasn't entirely certain how I felt about the prospect of Jonathan dating someone again. I wasn't sure I minded—it's not like I was any kind of candidate—but I wasn't sure I didn't mind, either.

As the meal wound to a close, Ruby and I drooped against each other on the bench, too sleepy from wine and good food to move. Then suddenly she bestirred herself.

“Jesus Christ, enough Man Rock already,” said Ruby, climbing to her feet. She marched over, yanked the speaker cable from Jonathan's phone, and plugged it into her iPhone. (The latest model, of course; Ruby prided herself on being a tech-y girl and had a full suite of Apple products, none of which exceeded the thickness of a Saltine.) The air filled with slow, loping guitar notes that intertwined and rolled over each other, one flickering off to the side while the other held steady on a repeating riff. It was aimless but sort of pleasant.

“You took off Apache Relay for the Grateful Dead?” Jonathan said.

“I need to get my mellow on. And this is the second best ‘Scarlet'/‘Fire' ever recorded.” Ruby disappeared into the house and returned a few minutes later carrying her vaporizer and a small nugget of weed. I had no idea how she hadn't run out of the stuff already.

“Ruby, exactly how much marijuana is under my roof at the moment?”

“Never you mind,” she murmured, smushing the bud into the grinder.

I watched as she twisted the grinder, then tapped the ground leaves into the chamber. “Is it enough to get me arrested?”

“It's enough to get you mellow,” she said, and flashed a grin at me as she clicked the vaporizer into life. After a few minutes, she put the pipe to her mouth, inhaled deeply, then pursed her lips and aimed a jet of white vapor into the air. “You really should try some.”

“What have I said to you the last four times you've offered me that?”

“You've asked me if it's going to make the house stink, and I've said no, and you've refused to try it, and I've told you you were missing out. Jonathan?”

He shook his head, smiling. In fifteen years, I have never even seen Jonathan
drunk
—that is how rigidly he controls himself.

“Wow, you guys are lame,” muttered Ruby. “Care, come on. Just try it. It's not going to turn you into a druggie. Live a little. Do something Adam wouldn't expect of you.”

And of everything she could have said, that is the one that needled me. And she knew it. She poked the pipe in my direction, one eyebrow raised as she waited for me to take it.

“Fine.”

The vaporizer was warm in my hand as I stared at it. Small and sleek, this, too, was perfectly Ruby—the dorky head-shop bongs I remembered from her college days were long gone. I put it to my lips, then hesitated. “What if I take too much?”

“You're not going to take too much. It'll be a miracle if you even get anything off it your first time.”

I closed my lips around the pipe and tentatively drew, while Ruby and Jonathan watched, their faces suspended in anticipation. But when I opened my mouth to do Ruby's smoke-jet trick, the white vapor billowed freely from my lips.

Ruby snorted. “I knew it. Have you ever even smoked a cigarette before? This is a little harder, you've got to really drag on it. Don't just breathe it into your mouth, suck it into your lungs. Here, try again. Get ready—now drag, deep, like you're filling your whole chest up.”

I did as she said, then clapped my lips shut in surprise at the sensation.

“Okay, breathe again,” said Ruby, and then she crowed as I released a huge gust of vapor amid an attack of frantic coughing.

“Ohhh! There it is! You know it's a good hit if you cough like that.”

“Why is this fun?” I gasped.

“Just ride it out. You'll calm down in a second. And then you will start to get happy. Jonathan, you sure you don't want to partake?” she said, flipping the vape back and forth between her fingers.

“Nah, I'm good,” he said.

“Gimme,” I said, and grabbed the pipe for another drag. Ruby yelped, but I batted her away. “Look, if I'm going to do something, I better do it all the way. Right?”

“Yeah, but I don't want you getting too wacky your first time out.”

“I thought that was the point.”

I took another deep inhale, and to my relief it went down a little more smoothly this time. I rolled my head back on the couch between the other two and stared up at the night. The last of the light had just about seeped from the sky, leaving only a silvery-blue glow at the horizon, and the stars were starting to glimmer against the evening dark. The moon had drifted high above the hills beyond the river, so bright it threw shadows on the ground. Somehow, the beauty of the evening eased my gnawing awareness of Adam's absence: It felt impossible I could actually be enjoying an evening without my husband this much, but it was so wonderful to sit here with my sister and my friend and soak up the pleasure of their company.

Gradually, I slid sideways until I could rest my head on Jonathan's chest, and flung my legs across Ruby's lap. Jonathan folded his arm around my collarbones, and I wrapped one hand around his forearm and closed my eyes so I could focus on drifting. His body was radiating heat, and his skin was smooth under my hand. I could feel Ruby tapping out the looping, flickering guitar notes of the song on my shin. Everything in the world felt absolutely wonderful. If this was what weed did, then I'd have to admit I understood the attraction.

“Wow, we've been listening to this song for an hour and a half now and Jerry hasn't even sung the first verse,” said Jonathan.

“Shut up, Blaster,” Ruby said.