He looked at me, at my eyes and forehead and lips. “Yes. Are you?”

I nodded. My mouth was open. My body was still but pushed to the limits of stillness—I was poised on the edge of moving, toward him or away from him, I wasn’t sure. He, too, was on the verge of moving, I could sense, but we stayed still and I closed my eyes again, waiting for either his mouth on me, or his hands on my body, or for nothing at all. He might have been waiting, too. We ended up dozing on the sand, and as I half-slept I felt the shade of the palm fronds moving over my body, back and forth in the breeze like a hand.

We slept for just under an hour. When I woke, Jack was sitting up with his legs crossed, facing the water. I touched his back and smiled when he turned around. A look briefly appeared on his face—a cross between fear and desire. I was hot, sweating along my brow and behind my knees. I got up and walked to the surf while Jack shook out the towel and folded it up and put it back in his car, along with the sweatshirt and towel we’d used as pillows.

“My body feels like Jell-O,” I said when he joined me at the shoreline.

“You’ll be sore tomorrow,” he said. He was referring to practice that day, to the dozens of serves and volleys.

“I can feel it starting already,” I said.

All of a sudden he’d moved behind me and pressed himself against my back, his mouth in the hair at my neck. His hands pulled against my hips. I felt off balance, like I might fall, but he was solid on his feet and held my weight. He hardened against my back. His breath on my neck came in bursts, like he’d been running. He made a sound like a soft grunt and his hand slipped under the front of my shirt and pressed against my stomach. I put my hand over his and his breathing in my ear slowed. I felt his mouth and nose move against my neck, his hot breath. Then he moved away. By the time I turned around he was walking back up the beach toward the car. He stopped at the door on the driver’s side and looked back at me, and I followed, still catching my breath. He got in, and I got in, and for a moment we sat there, not saying anything. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I wanted to say, I’m not. But then I thought that if I wasn’t now, I would be. “Don’t be,” I said.

“You do something to me.”

“We do it to each other,” I said, and I knew that by saying it aloud we’d cut the taut line that ran between us, and it would fall.

Marse’s brother, Kyle, married his second wife in late August in the Church of the Little Flower, down the street from the Biltmore Hotel, and the reception was held in the Biltmore’s main ballroom. Kyle had been there the day Dennis and I had met, and we’d hired Kyle’s contracting firm when we’d built the addition on the house, and so I suppose he’d felt obligated to invite us even though we hadn’t seen each other socially in years. Or maybe Marse, who was in the wedding party, added our names so she would have someone to dish with.

Bette called while I was getting dressed for the wedding, and I answered the kitchen phone in my panty hose while fishing with one hand through my purse for lipstick. “Suzanne wants to move,” Bette said. I pictured her rolling her eyes, her tight-lipped grimace. “She thinks the house is too small. She wants a garage, for crying out loud.”

I loved her house, which is what I told her. “But if Suzanne’s not happy there . . . ,” I said.

“She’s concerned about the investment.” She exhaled loudly. “She says we need to put our money where it can grow.”

“It is growing.”

“She said something about closet space.”

“Well, she has a point there.”

“And she says she’s tired of Miami.”

I put down my purse. “What does that mean? Where does she want to go?”

“I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d panic.”

“I’m not panicking,” I said. She’d never mentioned moving away before, not even once. It had never occurred to me that this was even possible.

She said, “Maybe what I need is a new girlfriend,” but she didn’t sound convinced.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I guess I have a decision to make,” she said before hanging up. “I hate that.”

Later that night, I found myself huddled with Marse on a divan in the corner of the Biltmore ballroom, a plate of hors d’oeuvres between us. Marse was telling me about the bride, a management consultant with very fresh-looking breasts and heavy white-blond bangs. “She’s not quite as young as she looks,” she said. “Kyle was drunk at the rehearsal. He was saying all sorts of crap. He said women our age are bitter, so he steers clear. He said he hoped she didn’t get bitter. I told him it was inevitable.”

“We’re bitter?”

“I am, he said. Single women my age are. You get to a certain point, he said.”

“Men shouldn’t use that word.”

“No, they shouldn’t. I didn’t mention that there’s a word for men his age who live in condos and buy black leather furniture.”

“Loser?” I said, and she nodded. Kyle wasn’t exactly a loser, but he had grown untidy with age; his hair was unkempt, and he didn’t put much thought into his wardrobe. But he’d made some money and drove a very silly car—something sporty and expensive, which I assumed younger women liked. His first wife, Julia, was a potter with a studio in Coconut Grove. Over the years I’d bought several of her pieces as gifts. She was at the wedding, too, and from where Marse and I were sitting, I could see her having what seemed to be an engrossing conversation with a man I didn’t recognize. She wore a light peach tunic and pearly white slacks. “Julia looks great,” I said.

“Kyle said she couldn’t be happier for him.” Marse pulled at the top of her dress, smoothing it out. “I’m too old to be a bridesmaid. I’m too old to have other people pick out my clothes.” She wore a garnet-colored, strapless organza dress with a sheer, cream-colored slip that showed at the hem, and a ribbon of the same color around the waist. I thought the outfit was pretty, but it didn’t agree with Marse, who was more comfortable in a fitted suit or a short tailored dress.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Done.”

“It might even fit me now,” I said.

“You look good. I’ve been meaning to mention it.”

I was wearing a dress I’d bought more than a year earlier but had never worn, because it had never fit right. It was a black-and-white plaid taffeta sheath with a low neckline. It hit just below my knees. Truth be told, I didn’t think it was dressy enough for a wedding, but I’d wanted to wear it—it finally looked good on me, after all—so I’d added patent leather pumps and jangly crystal earrings and swept my hair up. “It’s the tennis,” I said.

I knew it was hard on Marse, going to wedding after wedding, year after year. At some point the weddings had tapered off—when we were about thirty, I suppose—but a decade later the divorces had started, and then the second marriages. In the meantime, Marse had dated a dozen handsome, emotionally unavailable men. I didn’t think she wanted to get married per se, but she wanted something. “What’s happening with that guy?” I said, thinking of Ted, the boat salesman.

“Nothing. Over.”

“Do you want to get some air?”

“Lord, yes.”

I scanned the room for Dennis and saw that he was talking to Julia. I caught his eye and waved as we went out. At some point since the brief wedding service, it had started to rain. We stood under an awning in front of the hotel among guests who had come outside to have the valet get their cars. “Don’t we all look handsome,” mumbled Marse. She turned to me. “You’ve been absent lately. Is it possible you’re playing that much tennis?”

“I know. I don’t know what it is.” In the past week, I’d baked two loaves of bread and taken a nap every day. I’d been to the grocery store three times and painted two bookshelves that had been in the guest room since we’d moved into the house. They had been white, and now they were yellow. It was a modest change, but it made me happy—if not because they now matched the wallpaper, then because painting them had been on my list for so long and now was done. I hadn’t been to practice since the day at the beach with Jack, but I’d planned to return the following Wednesday and pretend nothing had ever happened.

“I thought with Margo gone you’d be a pain in my neck. How is she?”

“Fine. Apparently starting a new semester involves a lot of parties,” I said. “She’s enrolled in a class called Harbingers of Evil in Postmodern Literature. I keep meaning to ask for a copy of the syllabus. I could be one of those mothers who reads along with her child’s class.” A woman left the hotel and stepped into a black Lincoln, turning to wave as she did. I waved back. “Is that Eleanor Everest?” I said to Marse.

“Oh, God, I know—they botched her face-lift.” One of Eleanor’s cheeks drooped considerably, and the eyelid on the same side drooped as well, as if she’d been stuck with something and deflated. “She’s going to that guy in Naples to fix it, but they can’t get her in for six months. You’d think this would qualify as an emergency.”

“How did you hear all this?”

She waved a hand. “Around.” Marse’s social life had always been a bit of a mystery to me. When she was with me, when she picked me up in her Wrangler and we ran out to Dadeland mall or she came over with a movie (usually a movie she’d seen and wanted me to see), or we took her boat to Stiltsville to watch the sunset, then came back to my house to make dinner—during these times, she referred to the activities that comprised her week, often mentioning people I knew casually or men she’d dated and broken up with before I’d even heard about it. Mostly, though, she remained close with people I considered acquaintances, women from our days in the Junior League, people whose families her family had known for decades. In so many ways, Miami was a small town.

Did I think Marse had made a mistake, staying single? Did she?

When Marcus Beck had first left Kathleen, Marse and I had gone to Kathleen’s new condo for dinner, and Marse had asked her more or less the same question. “Do you miss him?” she’d said, and before I could stammer a protest—Marcus had left her, after twenty years together—Marse cut me off. “Let her answer,” she’d said, and Kathleen had nodded. “I wouldn’t say I miss him, because that would be pathetic,” she’d said. Truth be told, I hadn’t ever respected Kathleen much. She wore Laura Ashley dresses even though she was gaining on fifty, and her twin girls were sweet without seeming to mean it, and they’d been dorm roommates in college, an arrangement that I thought reflected poor parenting. But at this moment, sitting at Kathleen’s country French dining table, drinking the bold red wine Marse had brought, I’d been impressed. “I will say that I don’t like being alone,” Kathleen had said. “That’s all. I don’t like it.” She’d looked at Marse, who was shaking her head silently, and suddenly both of them looked older to me. They looked tired. “It sucks, doesn’t it?” said Marse to Kathleen. She looked at me, and then Kathleen looked at me. “We hate you,” said Marse, and Kathleen laughed lightly for a long time, and it had occurred to me that Marse had been faking it—maybe she wasn’t tired of being alone, and instead was trying to give an old friend someone to lean on. Marse wanted Kathleen to think they had much in common, but Kathleen was a housewife who was suddenly not a wife and not living in her house—she was a fish out of water, whereas Marse’s life made sense. Marse had a successful career, a busy social life, and a stream of romantic prospects. It wasn’t the same thing at all. Kathleen would be more lonely now precisely because she’d once had a husband and a home, not in spite of that.

I said to Marse, “Margo is living in an apartment, did I tell you that?” The rain was coming harder now, spattering the tops of my feet and ankles. Marse and I huddled closer together.

“Why would she want to do that?”

“I think it might have something to do with a boy.”

“A man,” said Marse. “She’s in college. They’re men, and she’s a woman. That’s what they want to be called, anyway.”

“I don’t think quite yet,” I said.

“You’re not ready.”

“I suppose not.”

“Who does she live with?”

At that moment, under the canopy outside the Biltmore’s stately main entrance, I could not recall her roommate’s name. “A girl from Tampa,” I said. “And I guess the girl’s boyfriend is pretty much a third roommate.”

“Have you met them?”

As a matter of fact, Margo and I had made plans that afternoon for me to come up for a weekend in October. “Not yet, but I will. Next month.”