TOM PERROTTA

The Abstinence Teacher

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition first published in Australia in 2008

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Fourth Estate

First published in USA in 2007 by St. Martins Press

Copyright © Tom Perrotta 2007

The right of Tom Perrotta to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007261000

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007319473

Version: 2017-03-29

For Joe Gordon

And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck.

—THE GOSPEL OF MARK

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One - Some People Enjoy It

Chapter 1 - Miss Morality

Chapter 2 - Let's Find Out

Chapter 3 - Who Do We Appreciate?

Part Two - Hot Christian Sex

Chapter 4 - Three-Legged Race

Chapter 5 - Praise Team

Part Three - Coach Tim's God

Chapter 6 - So Be It

Chapter 7 - Yusuf Islam

Chapter 8 - God's Warrior

Chapter 9 - A Big Day for the Lord

Chapter 10 - Refresher

Chapter 11 - Two Tims

Part Four - Presentation of Fears

Chapter 12 - Go Home to Your Wife

Chapter 13 - Faith Keepers

Chapter 14 - Good Morning

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Also by Tom Perrotta

About the Publisher

PART ONE Some People Enjoy It

Miss Morality

ON THE FIRST DAY OF HUMAN SEXUALITY, RUTH RAMSEY WORE A short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date—not that she was going on a lot of dates these days—let alone to work. It was a small act of rebellion on her part, a note to self— and anyone else who cared—that she was not a willing participant in the farce that would unfold later that morning in second-period Health & Family Life.

On the way to homeroom, Ruth stopped by the library to deliver the grande nonfat latte she regularly picked up for Randall, the Reference Librarian, a fellow caffeine junkie who returned the favor by making the midday Starbucks run. The two of them had bonded several years earlier over their shared revulsion for what Randall charmingly called the “warmed-over Maxwell Piss” in the Teacher's Lounge, and their willingness to spend outlandish sums of money to avoid it.

Randall kept his eyes glued to the computer screen as she approached. A stranger might have mistaken him for a dedicated Information Sciences professional getting an early start on some important research, but Ruth knew that he was actually scouring eBay for vintage Hasbro action figures, a task he performed several times a day. Randall's partner, Gregory, was a successful real-estate broker and part-time artist who built elaborate dioramas featuring the French Resistance Fighter GI Joe, an increasingly hard-to-find doll whose moody Gallic good looks were dashingly accentuated by a black turtleneck sweater and beret. In his most recent work, Gregory had painstakingly re-created a Parisian café circa 1946, with a dozen identical GI Jeans staring soulfully at each other across red-checkered tablecloths, tiny hand made Gauloises glued to their plastic fingers.

“Thank God,” he muttered, as Ruth placed the paper cup on his desk. “I was lapsing into a coma.”

“Any luck?”

“Just a few Russian infantrymen. Mint condition, my ass.” Randall turned away from the screen and did a bug-eyed double take at the sight of Ruth's outfit. “I'm surprised your mother let you out of the house like that.”

“My new image.” Ruth struck a pose, jutting out one hip and sucking in her cheeks like a model. “Like it?”

He gave her a thorough top-to-bottom appraisal, taking full advantage of the gay man's license to stare.

“I do. Very Mary Kay Letourneau, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“My daughters said the same thing. Only they didn't mean it as a compliment.”

Randall reached for his coffee cup, raising it to his lips and blowing three times into the aperture on the plastic lid, as though it were some sort of wind instrument.

“They should be proud to have a mom who can carry off a skirt like that at…” Randall's voice trailed off diplomatically.

“… at my age?” Ruth inquired.

“You're not that old,” Randall assured her. “And you look great.”

“Lotta good it does me.”

Randall sipped his latte and gave a philosophical shrug. He was a little older than Ruth, but you wouldn't have known it from his dark curly hair and eternally boyish face. Sometimes she felt sorry for him—he was a cultured gay man, an opera-loving dandy with a fetish for Italian designer eyewear, trapped all day in a suburban high school—but Randall rarely complained about the life he'd made for himself in Stonewood Heights, even when he had good reason to.

“You never know when opportunity will knock,” he reminded her. “And when it does, you don't want to answer the door in a ratty old bathrobe.”

“It better knock soon,” Ruth said, “or it won't matter what I'm wearing.”

Randall set his cup down on the Wonder Woman coaster he kept on his desk, next to an autographed picture of Maria Callas. The serious expression on his face was only slightly compromised by his milk-foam mustache.

“So how are you feeling?” he asked. “You okay about all this?”

Ruth shifted her gaze to the window behind the circulation desk, taking a moment to admire the autumnal image contained within its frame: a school bus parked beneath a blazing orange maple, a bright blue sky crowning the world. She felt a sudden urge to be far away, tramping through the woods or wandering around a strange city without a map.

“I just work here,” she said. “I don't make the rules.”

RUTH SPENT most of first period in the lounge, chatting with Donna DiNardo, a Biology teacher and field hockey coach in her late thirties. Over the summer, after years of being miserably single, Donna had met her soulmate—an overbearing optometrist named Bruce DeMastro— through an internet matchmaking service, and they'd gotten engaged after two magical dates.

Ruth had been thrilled when she heard the news, partly because of the fairy-tale aspect of the story, and partly because she'd gotten tired of Donna's endless whining about how hard it was to meet a man once you'd reached a certain age, which had only served to make Ruth that much more pessimistic about her own prospects. Oddly, though, finding love hadn't done much to improve Donna's mood; she was a worrier by nature, and the prospect of sharing her life with another person provided a mother lode of thorny new issues to fret about. Today, for example, she was wondering whether it would be a hardship for her students if, after the big day, she asked them to address her as Ms. DiNardo-DeMastro.

Although Ruth felt strongly that women should keep their names when they married—she hadn't done so, and now she was stuck with her ex-husband's last name—she kept this opinion to herself, having learned the hard way that you could only lose by taking sides in matters as basic as this. She had once offended a pregnant friend by admitting—after persistent demands for her honest opinion—to disliking the name “Claudia,” which, unbeknownst to her, the friend had already decided to bestow upon her firstborn child. Little Claudia was eight now, and Ruth still hadn't been completely forgiven.

“Do whatever you want,” Ruth said. “The students won't care.”

“But DiNardo-DeMastro?” Donna was standing by the snack table, peering into a box of Dunkin’ Munchkins with an expression of naked longing. She was a heavyset woman whose body image anxieties had reached a new level of obsession now that she'd been fitted for a wedding gown. “It's kind of a mouthful, isn't it?”

“You're fine either way,” Ruth assured her.

“It's driving me crazy.” Donna lifted a chocolate Munchkin from the box, pondered it for a moment, then put it back. “I really don't know what to do.”

With an air of melancholy determination, Donna backed away from the donut holes and helped herself to a styrofoam cup of vile coffee, into which she dumped two heaping spoonfuls of nondairy creamer and three packets of carcinogenic sweetener.

“Bruce hates hyphenated names,” she continued. “He just wants me to be Donna DeMastro.”

Ruth glanced plaintively around the room, hoping for a little backup from her colleagues, but the two other teachers present—Pete Fontana (Industrial Arts) and Sylvia DeLacruz (Spanish)— were ostentatiously immersed in their reading, none too eager to embroil themselves in the newest installment of Donna's prénuptial tribulations. Ruth didn't blame them; she would've done the same if not for her guilty conscience. Donna had been a kind and supportive friend last spring, when Ruth was the one with the problem, and Ruth still felt like she owed her.

“I'm sure you'll work something out,” she said.

“If my name was Susan it wouldn't be such a big deal,” Donna pointed out, drifting back toward the Munchkins as if drawn by an invisible force. “But Donna DiNardo-DeMastro? That's too many D's.”

“Alliteration,” agreed Ruth. “I'm a fellow sufferer.”

“I don't want to turn into a joke,” Donna said, with surprising vehemence. “It's hard enough to be a woman teaching science.”

Ruth sympathized with her on this particular point. Jim Wallenski, the man Donna had replaced, had been known as “Mr. Wizard” to three decades’ worth of Stonewood Heights students. He was a gray-haired, elfin man who wandered the halls in a lab coat and bow tie, smiling enigmatically as he tugged on his right earlobe, the Science Geek from central casting. Despite her master's degree in Molecular Biology, Donna just didn't look the part in her tailored bell-bottom pantsuits and tasteful gold jewelry. She was too earthbound, too well organized, too attentive to other people, more credible as a highly efficient office manager than as Ms. Wizard.

“I don't know, Ruth.” Donna peered into the Munchkins box. “I'm just feeling overwhelmed by all these decisions.”

“Eat it,” said Ruth.

“What?” Donna seemed startled. “What did you say?”

“Go ahead. One Munchkin's not gonna kill you.”

Donna looked scandalized. “You know I'm trying to be good.”

“Treat yourself.” Ruth stood up from the couch. “I gotta look over some notes. I'll catch up with you later, okay?”

After a very brief hesitation, Donna plucked a powdered Munchkin out of the box and popped it into her mouth, smiling at Ruth as she did so, as if the two of them were partners in crime. Ruth gave a little wave as she slipped out the door. Donna waved back, chewing slowly, her fingertips and lips dusted with sugar.

THE SUPERINTENDENT and the Virginity Consultant were waiting outside Room 23, both of them smiling as if they were happy to see Ruth come clackety-clacking down the long brown corridor, as if the three of them were old friends who made it a point to get together whenever possible.

“Well, well,” said Dr. Farmer, in the jaunty tone he only trotted out for awkward situations. “If it isn't the estimable Ms. Ramsey. Right on time.”

Glancing at Ruth's outfit with badly concealed disapproval, he thrust out his damp, meaty paw. She shook it, disconcerted as always by the change that came over the Superintendent when she found herself face-to-face with him. From a distance he looked like himself— the handsome, vigorous, middle-aged man Ruth had met fifteen years earlier—but up close he morphed into a bewildered senior citizen with rheumy eyes, liver spots, and unruly tufts of salt-and-pepper ear hair.

“Punctuality is one of my many virtues,” Ruth said. “Even my ex-husband would agree.”

Ruth's former husband—the father of her two children—had taught for a few years in Stonewood Heights before taking a job in nearby Gifford Township. He'd recently been promoted to Curriculum Supervisor for seventh- and eighth-grade Social Studies, and was rumored to be next in line for an Assistant Principalship at the middle school.

“Frank's a good man.” The Superintendent spoke gravely, as if defending Frank's honor. “Very dependable.”

“Unless you're married to him,” Ruth said, doing her best to make this sound like a lighthearted quip.

“How long were you together?” asked the consultant, JoAnn Marlow, addressing Ruth in that disarmingly cordial way she had, as if the two of them were colleagues and not each other's worst nightmare.

“Eleven years.” Ruth shook her head, the way she always did when contemplating the folly of her marriage. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

JoAnn laid a cool, consoling hand on Ruth's arm. As usual, she was done up like a contestant in a beauty pageant—elaborate hairdo, gobs of makeup, everything but the one-piece swimsuit and the sash that said “Miss Morality”— though Ruth didn't understand why she bothered. If you were determined to live like a nun—and determined to broadcast this fact to the world—why waste all that time making yourself pretty?

“Must be so awful,” JoAnn whispered, as if Ruth had just lost a close relative under tragic circumstances.

“Felt like a ton of bricks off my chest, if you want the truth. And Frank and I actually get along much better now that we don't have to see each other every day.”

“I meant for the children,” JoAnn explained. “It's always so hard on the children.”

“The girls are fine,” Ruth told her, resisting the urge to add, not that it's any of your business.

“Cute kids,” said Dr. Farmer. “I remember when the oldest was just a baby.”

“She's fourteen now,” said Ruth. “Just as tall as I am.”

“This is where the fun starts.” He shook his head, speaking from experience. His middle child, Andrea, had been wild, a teenage runaway and drug addict who'd been in and out of rehab numerous times before finally straightening out. “The boys start calling, you have to worry about where they are, who they're with, what time they're coming home—”

The bell rang, signaling the end of first period. Within seconds, the hallways were filled with platoons of sleepy-looking teenagers, nodding and muttering to one another as they passed. Some of them looked like little kids, Ruth thought, others like grown-ups, sixteen-and seventeen-year-old adults. According to surveys, at least a third of them were having sex, though Ruth knew all too well that you couldn't always guess which ones just from looking at them.

“Girls have to protect themselves,” JoAnn said. “They're living in a dangerous world.”

“Eliza took two years of karate,” Ruth reported. “She made it up to her green belt. Or maybe orange, I can't remember. But Maggie, my younger one, she's the jock. She's going to test for her blue belt next month. She does soccer and swimming, too.”

“Impressive,” noted Dr. Farmer. “My wife just started taking Tai Chi. She does it with some Chinese ladies in the park, first thing in the morning. But that's not really a martial art. It's more of a movement thing.”

The adults vacated the doorway, making way for the students who began drifting into the classroom. Several of them smiled at Ruth, and a few said hello. She'd felt okay right up to that point, more or less at peace with the decision she'd made. But now, quite suddenly, she became aware of the cold sweat pooling in her armpits, the queasy feeling spreading out from her belly.

“I was talking about spiritual self-defense,” said JoAnn. “We're living in a toxic culture. The messages these girls get from the media are just so relentlessly degrading. No wonder they hate themselves.”

Dr. Farmer nodded distractedly as he scanned the nearly empty hallway. His face relaxed as Principal Venuti rounded the corner by the gym and began moving toward them at high speed, hunched in his usual bowlegged wrestler's crouch, as if he were looking for someone to take down.

“Here's our fourth,” said Dr. Farmer. “So we're good to go.” “Looks like it,” agreed Ruth. “Be a relief just to get it over with.” “Oh, come on,” JoAnn said, smiling at Ruth to conceal her annoyance. “It's not gonna be that bad.”

“Not for you,” Ruth said, smiling right back at her. “It's gonna be just great for you.”

SOME PEOPLE enjoy it.

That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she'd had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she'd uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground.

The incident had occurred the previous spring, during a contraception lecture Ruth delivered to a class of ninth graders. She had just completed a fairly detailed explanation of how an IUD works when she paused and asked if anyone had any questions. After a moment, a pale, normally quiet girl named Theresa McBride raised her hand.

“Oral sex is disgusting,” Theresa declared, apropos of nothing. “You might as well French-kiss a toilet seat. You can get all sorts of nasty diseases, right?”

Theresa stared straight at Ruth, as if daring her to challenge this incontrovertible fact. In retrospect, Ruth thought she should have been able to discern the hostile intent in the girl's unwavering gaze—most of the ninth graders kept their eyes trained firmly on their desks during the more substantive parts of Sex Ed—but Ruth wasn't in the habit of thinking of her students as potential adversaries. If anything, she was grateful to the girl for creating what her grad school professors used to call “a teachable moment.”

“Well,” Ruth began, “from what I hear about oral sex, some people enjoy it.”

The boys in the back of the room laughed knowingly, an attitude Ruth chalked up more to bravado than experience, despite all the rumors about blowjobs being as common as hand-holding in the middle school. Theresa reddened slightly, but she didn't avert her eyes as Ruth continued with the more serious part of her answer, in which she discussed a few basic points of sexual hygiene, and described the body's ingenious strategies for separating the urinary and reproductive systems, even though they shared a lot of the same real estate. She finished by enumerating the various STD's that could and could not be transmitted through oral-to-genital contact, and recommending the use of condoms and dental dams to make oral sex safer for both partners.

“Done properly,” she said, “cunnilingus and fellatio should be a lot more pleasant, and a lot cleaner, than kissing a toilet seat. I hope that answers your question.”

Theresa nodded without enthusiasm. Ruth returned to her lecture, removing a diaphragm from its plastic case and whizzing it like a miniature Frisbee at Mark Royalton, the alpha male in the back row. Acting on reflex, Mark snatched the device from the air, and then let out a melodramatic groan of disgust when he realized what he was holding.

“Don't be scared,” Ruth told him. “It's brand-new. For display purposes only.”

IT WAS her own fault, she thought, for not having seen the trouble brewing. The atmosphere in the school, and around town, had changed a lot in the past couple of years. A small evangelical church— The Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth—led by a fiery young preacher known as Pastor Dennis, had begun a crusade to cleanse Stonewood Heights of all manner of godlessness and moral decay, as if this sleepy bedroom community was an abomination unto the Lord, Sodom with good schools and a twenty-four-hour supermarket.

Pastor Dennis and a small band of the faithful had held a successful series of demonstrations outside of Mike's World of Video, convincing the owner—Mike's son, Jerry—to close down a small “Adults Only” section in the back of the store; the church had also protested the town's use of banners that said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Tabernacle members had spoken out against the teaching of evolution at school board meetings, and initiated a drive to ban several Judy Blume novels from the middle-school library, including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, one of Ruth's all-time favorites. Randall had spoken out against censorship at the meeting, and had been personally attacked in the Stonewood Bulletin-Chronicle by Pastor Dennis, who said that it should come as no surprise to find immoral books in the school library when the school system placed “immoral people” in positions of authority.

“They've given the inmates control of the asylum,” Pastor Dennis observed. “Is it any wonder they're making insane decisions?”

But the good guys had won that battle; the school board had voted five to four to keep Judy Blume on the shelves (unfortunately, the books themselves had been repeatedly vandalized in the wake of this decision, forcing the librarians to remove them to a safe area behind the circulation desk). In any event, Ruth had foolishly chosen to view these skirmishes as a series of isolated incidents, storms that flared up and blew over, rather than seeing them for what they were—the climate in which she now lived.

Her second mistake was thinking of herself as invulnerable, somehow beyond attack. She'd been teaching high school Sex Ed for more than a decade and had become a beloved figure—or so she liked to think—for the unflappable, matter-of-fact candor with which she discussed the most sensitive of subjects. She believed—it was her personal credo—that Pleasure is Good, Shame is Bad, and Knowledge is Power; she saw it as her mission to demystify sex for the teenagers of Stonewood Heights, so they didn't go through their lives believing that masturbation was a crime against nature, or that oral sex was the functional equivalent of kissing a toilet seat, or worse, perpetuating the time-honored American Tradition of not even knowing there was such a thing as the clitoris, let alone where it was located. She was doing what any good teacher did—leading her students into the light, opening them up to new ways of thinking, giving them the vital information they needed to live their lives in the most rewarding way possible—and in doing so, she had earned more than her fair share of respect and affection from the kids who passed through her classroom, and some measure of gratitude from the community as a whole.

So when Principal Venuti told her that he needed to talk to her about an “important matter,” she showed up at his office without the slightest sense of misgiving. Even when she saw the Superintendent there, as well as a man who introduced himself as a lawyer for the school district, she felt more puzzled than alarmed.

“This isn't a formal interview,” the Superintendent told her. “We're just trying to get the facts straight.”

“What facts?” said Ruth.

The Principal and the Superintendent turned to the lawyer, who didn't look too happy.

“Ms. Ramsey, did you … umm … well, did you advocate the practice of fellatio to your students?”

“Did I what?”

The lawyer glanced at his yellow pad. “Last Thursday, in sixth-period Health? In response to a question by a Theresa McBride?”

“When Ruth realized what he was talking about, she laughed with relief.

“Not just fellatio,” she explained. “Cunnilingus, too. I would never single out just the one.”

The lawyer frowned. He was a slovenly guy in a cheap suit, the kind of attorney you sometimes saw on TV, blinking frantically, trying to explain why he'd fallen asleep during his client's murder trial. Stonewood Heights was a relatively prosperous town, but Ruth sometimes got the feeling that the people in charge didn't mind cutting a few corners.

“And you're telling us that you advocated these practices?”

“I didn't advocate them,” Ruth said. “If I remember correctly, I think what I said is that some people like oral sex.”

Joe Venuti let out a soft groan of dismay. Dr. Farmer looked like he'd been jabbed with a pin.

“Are you absolutely certain?” the lawyer asked in an insinuating tone. “Why don't you take a moment and think about it. Because if you're being misquoted, it would make everything a lot easier.”

By now it had finally dawned on Ruth that she might be in some kind of trouble.

“You want me to say I didn't say it?”

“It would be a relief,” admitted Dr. Farmer. “Save us all a big headache.”

“There were a lot of witnesses,” she reminded them.

“Nobody had a tape recorder, right?” The lawyer grinned when he said this, but Ruth didn't think he was joking.

“I can't believe this,” she said. “Are people not allowed to like oral sex anymore?”

“People can like whatever they want on their own time.” Joe Venuti stared at Ruth in a distinctly unfriendly manner. Before being named Principal, he'd been a legendary wrestling coach, famous for verbally abusing several generations of student-athletes. “But we can't be advocating premarital sex to teenagers.”

“Why do you guys keep saying that?” Ruth asked. “I wasn't advocating anything. I was just stating a fact. It's no different than saying that some people like to eat chicken.”

“If you said that some people like to eat chicken,” the lawyer told her, “I don't think Mr. and Mrs. McBride would be threatening a lawsuit.”

Ruth was momentarily speechless.

“Th—they're what?” she spluttered. “They're suing me?”

“Not just you,” the lawyer said. “The whole school district.”

“But for what?”

“We don't know yet,” said the lawyer.

“They'll think of something,” said Venuti. “They're part of that church. Tabernacle, whatever.”

“They got some Christian lawyers working pro bono,” Dr. Farmer explained. “These guys'll sue you for wearing the wrong color socks.”

AFTER LIVING the first forty-one years of her life in near-total obscurity, Ruth had been shocked to find herself transformed into a public figure—the Oral Sex Lady—a person she barely recognized. The story was first reported in the Bulletin-Chronicle (“Sex Ed Crosses Line, Family Says”), and then picked up by some larger regional papers before getting an unwelcome moment in the sun of a big-city tabloid (“Oral Sex A-OK, Teacher Tells Kids”). Ruth was contacted by numerous journalists eager to get her side of the so-called scandal, and although she was itching to defend herself—to rebut the malicious and ill-informed Letters to the Editor, to put her “controversial remarks” in some sort of real-life context, to speak out about what she saw as the proper role of Sexuality Education in the high-school curriculum—she had received strict instructions not to comment from the school district's lawyer, who didn't want her to jeopardize the “sensitive negotiations” he was conducting with the McBrides’ legal team.

The gag order remained in effect during the emergency school board meeting called to address the crisis, which meant that, after issuing a terse, abject apology to “anyone who might have been offended” by anything she'd said “that might have been inappropriate,” Ruth had to sit down and shut up while speaker after speaker rose to accuse her of recklessness and irresponsibility and even, in the case of one very angry old man, to suggest that she had more than a thing or two in common with “a certain lady from Babylon.” A handful of parents spoke up on Ruth's behalf, but their support felt tepid at best—people were understandably reluctant to rally around the banner of oral sex at a school board meeting—and their statements were regularly interrupted by a chorus of boos from the Tabernacle contingent.

The bad taste from this experience was still strong in Ruth's mouth when she got to work the next morning and found a notice in her mailbox announcing a special schoolwide assembly on the subject of “Sexual Abstinence: Saying Yes to Saying No,” presented by an organization called Wise Choices for Teens. At any other point in her career, Ruth would have barged into the Principal's office and told Joe Venuti exactly what she thought about Abstinence Education—that it was a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance—but she was well aware of the fact that her opinion was no longer of the slightest interest to the school administration. This lecture was damage control, pure and simple, a transparent attempt to placate the Tabernacle people and their supporters, to let them know that their complaints had been heard.

So Ruth buttoned her lip—it had become second nature—and went to the assembly, curious to see what the students would make of it. After all, Stonewood Heights wasn't the Bible Belt; it was a well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either. On the whole, the kids who grew up here believed in money, status, and fun; most of them would readily admit that they were a lot more focused on getting into a good college than the Kingdom of Heaven. They traveled, drove nice cars, wore cool clothes, and surfed the web on their camera phones. It was hard to imagine them being particularly receptive to the idea that an earthly pleasure existed that they weren't entitled to enjoy whenever and however they felt like it.

Ruth wasn't sure what kind of spokesperson she'd been expecting, but it certainly wasn't the young woman who took the stage after a warm welcome from Principal Venuti. The guest speaker wasn't just blond and pretty; she was hot, and she knew it. You could see it in the way she moved toward the podium—like a movie star accepting an award—that consciousness she had of being watched, the pleasure she took in the attention. She wore a tailored navy blue suit with a knee-length skirt, an outfit whose modesty somehow provoked curiosity rather than stifling it. Ruth, for example, found herself squinting at the stage, trying to decide if the unusually proud breasts straining against the speaker's silk blouse had been surgically enhanced.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “My name is JoAnn Marlow, and I'd like to tell you a few things about myself. I'm twenty-eight years old, I'm a Leo, I'm a competitive ballroom dancer, and my favorite band is Coldplay. I like racquet sports, camping and hiking, and going for long rides on my boyfriend's Harley. Oh, yeah, and one more thing: I'm a virgin.”

She paused, waiting for the audience to recover from a sudden epidemic of groans and snickers, punctuated by shouts of “What a waste!” and “Not for long!” and “I'll be gentle!” issuing from unruly packs of boys scattered throughout the auditorium. JoAnn didn't seem troubled by the hecklers; it was all part of the show.

“I guess you feel sorry for me, huh? But you know what? I don't care. I'm happy I'm a virgin. And my boyfriend's happy about it, too.”

Somebody coughed the word “Bullshit,” and pretty soon half the crowd was barking into their clenched fists. It got so bad that Principal Venuti had to stand up and give everyone the evil eye until they stopped.

“You probably want to know why I'm so happy about something that seems so uncool, don't you? Well, let me tell you a story.”

The story was about a carefree girl named Melissa whom JoAnn had known in college. Melissa slept around, but figured it was okay, because the guys always used condoms. One night, though, when she was having “safe sex” with this handsome stud she'd met at a bar—a guy she didn't know from Adam—the condom just happened to break, as condoms will.

“The guy looked healthy,” JoAnn explained. “But he had AIDS. Melissa's dead now. And I'm alive. That's reason number one why I'm glad to be a virgin.”

It turned out JoAnn had a lot of reasons. She was happy because she'd never had gonorrhea, like her friend, Lori, a straight A student who didn't realize she was sick until prom night, when she discovered a foul puslike discharge on her underwear; or the excruciatingly painful Pelvic Inflammatory Disease suffered by her ex-roommate, Angela, who'd let her chlamydia go untreated, and was now infertile; or herpes, like her old rock-climbing buddy, Mitch, who couldn't walk some days because of the agony caused by the festering sores on his penis; or hideous incurable genital warts like her otherwise-cute-as-a-button neighbor, Misty; or crabs, which were not actually crabs but lice—real live bugs!— having a party in your pubic hair, like they'd done to her exdancing partner, Jason.

“Oh, my friends used to tease me a lot,” JoAnn said. “They called me a prude and a Goody Two-Shoes. Well, you can bet they're not teasing me now.”

And there was one more thing. JoAnn was glad she'd never gone through what her friend Janice had, never had to pee on a stick to discover she was pregnant by some jerk she'd met at a frat party and would never have even spoken to if she hadn't been so drunk she could barely walk; never had to drive to an abortion clinic with this same jerk, who despised her as badly as she despised him; never had to lie there in a hospital gown while some creepy doctor did his business with a vacuum hose; never had to live with the responsibility of making a baby and then not allowing it to be born.

“I can sleep at night,” JoAnn declared, “and that's more than I can say for a lot of people I know. I can sleep because I don't have any regrets. I'm a strong, self-sufficient individual, and I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that my mind and my body are one hundred percent intact. They're mine and mine alone, and I'm proud of that.”

It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words—shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric—nothing Ruth hadn't been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there—until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she'd been manipulated—even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she'd ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?

After a short Q&A, JoAnn concluded her talk with a slide show. Instead of the gallery of diseased genitalia that Ruth had expected, though, Stonewood Heights High School was treated to a series of photographs of JoAnn and her boyfriend vacationing on a Caribbean island. If you didn't know better, you might have thought they were on their honeymoon—two happy, attractive young people frolicking in the ocean, drinking out of coconut shells by the pool, kissing beneath a palm tree, clearly reveling in each other's company (now that she'd gotten a glimpse of JoAnn's fearsome bikini cleavage, Ruth was convinced that her breasts had indeed benefited from cosmetic surgery). The final image showed the boyfriend alone—a buff, shirtless, all-American guy—standing by the water's edge in his swimming trunks, a surfboard tucked under his arm.

“As you might imagine,” JoAnn said, “it's not easy saying no to a superhot guy like Ed. But when it gets hard, I just remind myself of my wedding night, and how amazing it's going to be when I give myself to my husband with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a perfectly intact body Because that's going to be my reward, and mark my words, people—it is going to be soooo good, oh my God, better than you can even imagine.”

The lights came on, and the students applauded enthusiastically, though Ruth wasn't quite sure if they were applauding for the hot sex JoAnn would have in the future or her commitment to avoiding it in the here and now. Either way, Ruth had to grudgingly admit to herself that she was impressed. JoAnn Marlow had somehow pulled off the neat feat of seeming sexy and puritanical at the same time, of impersonating a feminist while articulating a set of ideas that would have seemed retro in 1954, of making abstinence seem steamy and adventurous, a right-wing American variation on Tantric sex. It was a little scary.

But it was over. Or at least Ruth thought it was, until she walked out of the auditorium and saw Dr. Farmer and Principal Venuti and several members of the school board standing in the hallway, looking pleased and excited.

“Wasn't that extraordinary?” Dr. Farmer asked her. “What a great role model for the kids.”

“Informative, too,” said Venuti. “Lots of medical facts and whatnot.”

The board members—there were five of them, enough for a voting majority—nodded in enthusiastic agreement, and Ruth saw that it would be useless to quibble with JoAnn's facts or find fault with the way she'd presented them. The situation had clearly progressed beyond the point where facts were of any use to anyone, so she just nodded politely and went on her way.

At least this way she had a heads-up, and didn't feel ambushed a month later when the school board announced that the high school would be revamping its Sex Education curriculum over the summer, with the help of a dynamic nonprofit organization called Wise Choices for Teens. Later that same meeting, it was also announced that the McBride family had decided not to file a lawsuit against the Stonewood Heights School District after all.

A PALPABLE current of electricity moved through the classroom as Ruth perched herself on the edge of the metal desk, primly crossing her legs at the ankles. Tugging at the hem of her skirt, she found herself momentarily startled—it was something that happened a lot these days—by the sight of her calves, which had been transformed by all the running she'd done over the summer. They looked lovely and unfamiliar, almost as if she'd borrowed them from a woman half her age.

She'd started exercising in late spring, at the height of the scandal, on the suggestion of her ex-husband, who thought that a vigorous aerobic workout might alleviate the tension headaches and insomnia that had left her groggy and short-tempered, in no condition to function as a teacher or a parent. He reminded her of how riding a bicycle had gotten him through the darkest days of their divorce, when he missed their daughters so much he regularly cried himself to sleep at night.

“You can't brood,” he told her. “You gotta go out and do something positive.”

It was the best advice he ever gave her. She started small, half-walking, half-jogging a few laps around the middle-school track, but her body responded right away. In July, she was running three miles a day at a slow, steady clip; by mid-August, a brisk five-miler no longer made her feel like she was going to throw up or die of heatstroke. She ran a 10k race on Labor Day, finishing ninth in the Women Forty and Over category. In six months, she lost twenty pounds, streamlined her entire lower body, and realized, to her delight and amazement, that she looked thinner and healthier than she had in college, where she'd majored in Psychology and minored in Doritos. The only downside to this midlife physical transformation was that it made her that much more conscious of the absence of a man in her life—it seemed like such a waste, having a nice body again, and no one to appreciate it.

What the running mainly did, though—she could see it more clearly in retrospect than she'd been able to at the time—was provide her with a way of working through her anger and coming to some level of acceptance of the new regime. Because as much as she would have liked to stand up for what she believed in and resign in protest, where would she have been then? She was a divorced mother with two daughters who would soon be going to college, a tenured teacher with six years to go before she qualified for a full pension. It wouldn't be easy to find another district in the area willing to hire someone with her baggage. And besides, as Randall frequently reminded her, if she quit then they would win, the forces of shame and denial, the people who'd praise the Lord if they forced her out of the classroom and replaced her with someone more compliant. Wouldn't it be better to stay put and see what happened? The Abstinence curriculum was a pilot program, part of a two-year study funded by a federal grant. When it ended, who knew what would take its place?

All of these arguments had seemed perfectly plausible to Ruth as she'd jogged around Stonewood Lake at dusk, or huffed and puffed down the bike path at the first light of dawn. But right now, looking out on a classful of ninth graders, she wondered if she'd been betrayed by the endorphins, because all she wanted to do was apologize to her students for letting them down, for allowing it to come to this.

She knew it was past time to get started, but she couldn't seem to locate her voice. The kids were watching her closely, their faces alert and curious, paying the kind of attention she would have killed for on any other day. In the back row, the minders were growing restless, exchanging glances of puzzlement and concern. JoAnn leaned in close to Dr. Farmer and whispered something in his ear. Principal Venuti cleared his throat at high volume and made a spinning motion with his index finger, signaling that it was time to get rolling. Ruth felt a disgustingly fake smile—an adolescent reaction to social panic that she'd never fully conquered—tugging at the corners of her mouth. It took an effort of will for her to rein it in.

“Well,” she finally managed to croak, in a voice she didn't recognize as her own. “Here we are.”

Let's Find Out

IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER SIX ON FRIDAY EVENING, BUT ALREADY Bombay Palace was packed, the entrance overrun with cranky families who'd just been informed that they'd have to wait half an hour for a table at the town's only half-decent alternative to Applebee's. Tearing off a piece of alu paratha, Ruth registered a flicker of pleasure at her own free agent status. It was one of the few compensations of divorce, she thought, the one night a week when Frank took the girls and she was able to do what she wanted, no babysitter to pay, no one to report to when she got home. A perfect opportunity to be bad, if she'd had anyone to be bad with.

“Look on the bright side,” Gregory told her. “At least you're practicing what you preach.”

“I don't think it qualifies as abstinence if it's involuntary,” Ruth told him. “It's just pathetic.”

“And it's definitely not abstinence if a vibrator's involved,” Randall added.

“You're right about that,” she said. “The new curriculum clearly states that masturbation of any kind is strictly verboten. Apparently it's habit-forming and interferes with your schoolwork.”

“Damn,” said Gregory. “So that's why I didn't get into Harvard.”

“Frankly,” said Randall, “it's a miracle you got your real-estate license.”

Gregory nodded. “I'm just glad I didn't have to take the test when I was fifteen.”

“Believe me,” said Ruth. “The kids didn't look too happy when I broke the news.”

“I bet Homo Joe was pretty devastated, too,” Randall observed. “What's he gonna do with that economy-size jar of Vaseline he carries around in his coat pocket?”

“Or that Burt Reynolds centerfold in his wallet?” said Gregory.

It was a running joke between Randall and Gregory that Principal Venuti was actually a closeted gay man—aka “Homo Joe”— who took extralong showers in the boys’ locker room, kept a stash of pilfered jockstraps in his “Confidential” file cabinet, and was frequently seen dancing at The Manhole in tight jeans, a fishnet shirt, and a Prince Valiant wig. Whenever possible, a new perversion was added to the list.

“I really don't get the logic behind the whole abstinence thing,” said Gregory. “I mean, I grew up being taught that premarital sex was wrong, and gay people were going straight to hell, and playing with yourself was a sin. And look how I turned out.”

“Greg was wearing leather hot pants and a studded dog collar on the night we met,” Randall told Ruth.

“I know,” said Ruth. “You showed me the pictures.”

“It was a Halloween party,” Gregory explained. “And I'd just left the seminary. I was trying to make up for lost time.”

“I'm not complaining.” Randall reached across the table and gave his boyfriend's hand a furtive squeeze. “And I wouldn't say no to a reenactment later on.”

“We can try,” Gregory said skeptically. “But you'll need a crowbar to get my fat ass into those shorts.”

“The collar will suffice,” Randall assured him.

As she often did in their company, Ruth wondered how much of this banter was serious and how much was manufactured for her entertainment. Either way, dinner with Randall and Gregory was a lot livelier than the occasional girls’ night out she shared with Donna DiNardo and Ellen Michaels, a longtime colleague who taught History Defying the Sex and the City stereotype of randy, uninhibited single gals dishing colorful secrets to their friends, the three women rarely spoke about anything but work and movies. Ruth and Donna made a special effort to steer clear of the problematic realms of sex and romance, lest they trigger one of Ellen's weepy, chardonnay-fueled tirades against her ex-husband, Marty, a lawyer who'd run off with a much younger colleague and started a new family, leaving her all alone in a big empty house, her kids grown up and gone, nothing but the goddam TV for company, probably for the rest of her life.

Tonight, especially, Ruth was grateful to have such diverting companions. It had been a rough week, a sustained attack on her dignity and self-esteem. Here she was—a woman who had always prided herself on being a fighter—standing up day after day in her own classroom and, under the watchful eyes of her three “guest observers,” betraying everything she'd ever stood for as a teacher, the values on which she'd built her entire career. She'd done what she could to let the kids know she wasn't buying what she was selling—grimacing, talking in a robotic voice, stressing as often as she could that the curriculum didn't necessarily reflect her personal opinion—but it didn't matter much. She still felt dirty at the end of each class, unable to meet her students’ eyes as they filed out of the room.

“Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory,” Gregory said. “It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.”

“Just ask Father John,” Randall said.

“Who's that?” asked Ruth.

“The priest who molested him.” Randall looked at Gregory. “What were you, twelve?”

“Thirteen,” said Gregory.

“What?” Ruth was taken aback. “You guys are kidding, right?”

Both men shook their heads.

“Really?” she said. “By a priest?”

“Finally.” Randall pumped his fist in mock triumph. “A story we haven't told her.”

“Molested is too strong a word,” Gregory said. “I think it's more accurate to say it was consensual.”

“Come on,” Randall protested. “Nothing's consensual when you're thirteen.”

“Not technically,” Gregory conceded. “But I did enjoy it. And I certainly volunteered for more.”

“That's putting it mildly,” said Randall.

“Don't mind him,” Gregory told Ruth. “He's just jealous.”

Ruth nodded, trying to look as nonjudgmental as possible. No woman she knew would have admitted to enjoying sexual advances from an authority figure at thirteen, but she had come to believe that certain things really were different for men.

“He was a cute little altar boy,” Randall said. “The whole thing was such a tawdry cliché.”

Ruth had no trouble believing this. Even at thirty-eight, with his apple-cheeked face and lank, sandy hair, Gregory still looked like a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, despite the weight he'd put on in the past couple of years. At thirteen, he must have been an angel.

“Father John was a sweet, mixed-up man.” Gregory smiled wistfully at the memory. “He died of AIDS, but none of the parishioners would admit it. To this day, they still call it cancer.”

“Thirteen's too young,” Randall insisted. “I agree with the abstinence people on that.”

“Maybe,” said Gregory. “But the other kids had been calling me a fag since second grade.”

“So?” Randall said. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“I don't know.” Gregory looked thoughtful. “It was just kind of a relief to make it official.”

“You were lonely, and he took advantage,” Randall said. “You should at least be able to see it for what it was.”

“It happened to me,” Gregory snapped. “Not to you. So don't tell me what it was.”

“I just don't think it's right,” Randall muttered.

“I guess I wasn't as lucky as you.” There was an edge in Gregory's voice that Ruth hadn't heard before. “I didn't meet Mr. Perfect on the first day of college and have a storybook romance.”

“Honey, I'm not criticizing. I'm just trying to make a point.” Randall turned to Ruth. “Don't you think thirteen's too young?”

“Everybody's different,” Ruth said after a brief hesitation, reluctant to take sides in the dispute. “It's hard to generalize.”

“That's too easy,” Randall shot back. “You're a mother. Do you want your daughters having sex at thirteen?”

Ruth shrugged. “I hope they wait till they're in college. But a lot of people don't.”

Gregory pounced. “Did you?”

Ruth poked at her sag paneer for a moment before answering.

“I had my first real boyfriend in college,” she said. “There were a couple of weird experiences in high school, but I didn't really know how to process them.”

Randall and Gregory traded prurient looks, allies again.

“Weird experiences,” said Randall. “Now you've got our attention.”

“Come on.” Gregory made a coaxing motion with his hand. “Don't hold out on us.”

“It was nothing,” Ruth insisted. “Just, you know, the standard groping.”

“The standard groping's always been good enough for me,” Randall said.

“As opposed to the substandard?” Gregory inquired.

“Even that's better than nothing,” Randall said with a laugh. “Who wants another Kingfisher?”

RUTH HAD trouble falling asleep. This was often the case when she'd had too much to drink, and she almost always had too much to drink when she hung out with Randall and Gregory. She'd gone to their house after the restaurant, ostensibly to watch a Margaret Cho video, but they'd gotten sidetracked. First they headed down to Gregory's basement studio to look at his latest work, an unusually large installation that placed several French Resistance Fighter GI Joes in a maze of soulless office cubicles, each doll staring at identical miniature computer screens displaying the smiling face of the late Pope John Paul II. Ruth was puzzled by the piece until Gregory explained that it was an allegory designed to illustrate the way that existentialism/atheism had lost ground to organized religion in recent years as a result of the widespread anxiety generated by the ever more intrusive presence of digital technology in our lives.

“Wow.” Ruth was impressed. “You really packed a lot into it.” Gregory seemed pleased. “Art is all about compression.” “It took me three months to round up those action figures,” Randall said, reminding them of his own contribution to the project. He wagged a finger at Gregory. “From now on you're going to have to start working with Barbies.”

“Yeah, right,” Gregory muttered, as if this quip had been intended seriously. “That'd be really original.”

Randall smiled the way people do when they're hurt and trying not to show it, then herded them upstairs to try out a recipe for chocolate martinis that he'd cut out of last Sunday's paper.

The experiment was not a success. After a couple of sips, they dumped the vile concoction into the sink and switched to Manhattans, a much safer bet. While Randall mixed her drink, Ruth picked up a MotoPhoto envelope resting on the table and shuffled through the pictures, which documented the Massachusetts wedding of Dan and Jerry, two of Randall and Gregory's oldest friends. They made for a striking pair, one man tall and bald and amiable in a black tux, the other in white, bearded and stocky and a bit too intense. The two grooms danced cheek to cheek, fed each other cake, and posed with their elderly parents, who smiled gamely, if a bit uncomfortably, at the camera. Randall had found the ceremony to be incredibly moving—like a dream, he said—while Gregory took a darker view, knowing what he did about Dan and Jerry's troubled relationship.

“These guys break up every six months or so,” he said. “They only get back together because they're so devoted to making each other unhappy.”

Ruth laughed. “Sounds like a lot of couples I know.”

“Dan and Jerry have every bit as much right to a bad marriage as anyone else,” Randall said.

“People shouldn't get married just because they can,” Gregory said.

Randall glared at him, his face flushed from a combination of alcohol and anger.

“Everything doesn't have to be perfect, you know. You just have to love each other for better or worse.”

Gregory turned to Ruth. “This is about us, you know. He's mad at me for not proposing.”

“I'm not mad ax. you,” Randall insisted. “I just can't figure out why you're so scared. We've been together for twelve years.”

“I'm not scared,” Gregory said. “I just don't see the point of getting engaged if we can't get married.”

“We're making a commitment,” Randall said. “Once it's legal, we'll be first in line.”

“Let's cross that bridge when we get to it,” Gregory said.

“Forget it.” Randall's face tightened into an unconvincing smile. “It's really not worth fighting about.”

“Who's fighting?” said Gregory. “We're having a calm discussion.”

Randall drained his martini.

“Let's just watch the movie.”

It was already after ten. Ruth tried to make a graceful exit, but Randall insisted she at least watch the first ten minutes, where Margaret did the hilarious imitation of her crazy Korean mother. She reluctantly agreed, but then got sucked in and stayed to the bitter end, by which point both her hosts had fallen asleep—Gregory dozing in an armchair, hands resting on his belly, and Randall snoring softly on the couch, his face naked, almost babyish, without his glasses. It didn't look to Ruth like anyone would be breaking out the dog collars anytime soon. She kissed them both good night and showed herself to the door.

RUTH MADE a point of sleeping in the nude when her daughters were out of the house. It was a simple indulgence, and, sadly enough, the erotic highlight of her week. This private ritual—shedding her clothes in the dark, slipping between the cool sheets, savoring the soft touch of cotton against her skin—had come to seem like a kind of foreplay, automatically nudging her toward that vibrant fantasy realm that, by default, was her sole source of sexual pleasure. And if these fantasies sometimes inspired her to break out the vibrator she kept hidden in a shoe box on a high shelf in her closet, well, so what? It was her body— her lean, muscular, lovely, unloved body—and didn't it deserve to feel good every once in a while, especially if there was no one around to overhear the humming of the busy little machine, or the grateful cries of a woman who had no one to thank but herself?

Tonight, though, her mind was elsewhere. She lay in the dark, exhausted and wired at the same time, her eyes wide open, the weight of solitude pressing down on her like a heavy blanket. She missed her daughters, wondered if the house would always feel this empty when they left for college, vast and unmoored, ready to lift away from its foundation like a hot-air balloon. She comforted herself with the thought that she still had seven years before Maggie graduated high school, long enough to make some changes. Maybe there'd be a man by then; maybe the exodus of the girls would feel more like a honeymoon than an abandonment, a transition from one rich phase of her life to the next.

Maybe.

Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it. Ruth's mother had sounded this note a lot in the weeks before she died, a kind of desperate nostalgia for everything she hadn't appreciated when she'd had the chance.

“Remember that house in Manasquan?” she'd say, propped up in the hospital bed, clutching the “pain button” that allowed her to dispense her own morphine. “The one we rented in what… 1978? That was a fun vacation. You enjoyed that, right?”

“I did,” Ruth would say, because it would have been cruel to remind her of the truth, which was that they'd all been disappointed by something they'd been dreaming about for years. The house they rented was small and smelled bad; the beach had been closed for two days because of medical waste that had washed ashore. But mainly, that vacation had just come too late. Ruth was a teenager by then, a claustrophobic adolescent trapped in close quarters with her family, just gritting her teeth and waiting for it to be over. The only good times she remembered involved sneaking out at night with her older sister and smoking cigarettes on the boardwalk.

“It was so lovely by the ocean,” her mother whispered, though it seemed to Ruth that she'd spent most of the week inside that cramped bungalow, cooking and cleaning and watching TV, the exact same things she did at home. “Let's go there again sometime.”

Ruth shut her eyes tight and rolled onto her side, feeling perilously close to crying. The night had taken a toll on her, all that bickering between Randall and Gregory. She'd suspected they were having problems for a while now—Randall had certainly hinted at this in various ways—but until tonight, she'd allowed herself to assume that it was nothing serious. Now, for the first time, she felt it necessary to consider the possibility that they might be headed for a breakup, and she was surprised by how much it disturbed her. She liked them both as individuals, but she liked them even more as a couple. Sometimes, when she tried to imagine her future and couldn't summon the image of a man who loved her, she found herself entertaining an alternative scenario, in which she and Randall and Gregory traveled the world together, a witty trio visiting interesting places and eating adventurous food, laughing everywhere they went. It was hard to trade this in for an imaginary future in which she'd have to deal with them separately— like a child of divorced parents—watching what she said, trying not to take sides, eventually having to meet their new boyfriends, all the while pining for the good old days.

Beneath this worry, though, something else was gnawing at her. One of the things she most valued about her friendship with the guys was how honest it was. It had occurred to her more than once in the past couple of years that Randall and Gregory were the only people who really knew her anymore, the only ones she could trust with her secrets. Among other things, she'd confided in them about her lackluster sex life with Frank, about the two men she'd slept with in the year after her divorce—the memorable one-night stand at the Teachers’ Association Conference in Atlantic City, and the divorced computer guy who'd decided to move to North Carolina just when things were heating up between them—and about the dry spell she'd endured since then. They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested. That was why she'd been so surprised to find herself lying to them at dinner when Gregory asked her if she'd waited until college to become sexually active. It would have been the perfect time—and a huge relief—to finally tell the truth.

Because the fact was, she'd never told anyone about Paul Caruso— not her mother or sister, not her college roommate, none of her boyfriends, not her husband, not even the two therapists she'd seen.

And she really didn't know why There was nothing particularly shameful about it. Just two bored teenagers exploring their sexuality together, a necessary passage from curiosity into experience. It happened every day.

Or at least it used to, she thought.

PAUL CARUSO was Ruth's next-door neighbor growing up, a fat kid two years ahead of her in school. Because he happened to be a cool guy and a talented musician, he had been spared some of the ritual humiliations visited upon the other “big boys” at Oakhurst Regional. Alone among this long-suffering cohort, Paul had avoided being saddled with a nickname like Wide Load or Truck or Blob or Blivet or Butterball or Lardass or Tiny or Two-Ton or Chubby Checker. He was just Paulie C, star trumpeter of the jazz ensemble and the marching band, an award-winning outfit renowned for its complicated routines and high-stepping military precision. People seeing a Wolverines’ halftime show for the first time would invariably find their gazes drawn to the tubby kid with the gleaming horn and the dark hair spilling out from the ridiculous toy soldier hat with the too-tight chinstrap, and feel compelled to remark on his nimble footwork, the surprising grace he displayed for someone lugging around such a heavy burden.

In the spring of his senior year, Paul broke his ankle stepping off an escalator at the North Vista Mall. It was a freak accident; he said he put his foot down wrong and the bone just snapped like a pencil. With only a couple of months to go before graduation, he found himself hobbling around on crutches, the lower half of his right leg encased in a bulky plaster cast. He couldn't practice with the band, couldn't work the clutch on his Civic hatchback. His girlfriend, Missy Prince—a broad-shouldered softball pitcher widely considered the prettiest girl jock in the school—picked him up in the morning, but she had practice in the afternoon. Apparently, Paul's other friends were occupied as well, because he was soon reduced to taking the bus home from school, the transportation choice of very last resort for a senior.

Paul had been riding the bus for about a week when Ruth approached him on the sidewalk; he had just completed a laborious dismount from the vehicle, hopping on one foot with his crutches tucked under his arm, backpack in one hand and a trumpet case in the other. He gratefully accepted her offer of help, and the two of them set off on the slow trek to Peony Road, making stilted small talk about Ruth's sister, Mandy, who was nearing the end of her first year at Rutgers. She helped him up the steps to his front door—he used her shoulder for support, bearing down so hard she thought she might crumple like an aluminum can—then followed him inside, through the hall and into the kitchen, which seemed instantly familiar to her, despite the fact that she hadn't been there in years, not since she, Mandy, and Paul had played together as little kids. Everything was exactly the same as she remembered: the cushiony red benches of the breakfast nook, the toaster that accepted eight slices of bread, the needlepoint sampler over the stove that said, Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take.

“Here you go,” she said, setting the backpack and trumpet down on the table.

“Thanks.” Paul smiled, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a pale green dish towel. He seemed to be having a little trouble catching his breath. “Didn't know … how I was gonna … carry all that shit.”

“No problem,” said Ruth. “It was on my way.”

He used his pinky and ring fingers to lift a few strands of hair from his forehead and tuck them behind his ear, an oddly girlish gesture that made Ruth suddenly conscious of the delicacy of his features— small nose, feathery eyelashes, the ghost of a narrower face encased in the flesh of a broader one.

“You, uh, want a sandwich or something?” he asked.

Ruth hesitated. The kitchen was dim and silent, and it was no longer possible to ignore the obvious fact that they were alone in the house. Mr. Caruso worked on the assembly line at the GM plant; Mrs. Caruso ran the office for Ruth's dentist. His brothers and sisters were older, living on their own.

“I don't think so,” she said.

“We got roast beef, ham, turkey—”

“I'm not really hungry.”

“You sure? How about a soda or something?”

“I better get home.”

He gave her what Ruth later remembered as a searching look, focusing a whole new kind of attention on her, as if he'd suddenly realized that she'd grown up, and had become something more interesting than his next-door neighbor's little sister.

Embarrassed by his scrutiny, Ruth felt her eyes drift down over his soft belly and broad thighs before finally landing on his cast, which was almost completely covered with psychedelic graffiti. There were still a couple of empty spaces near the toe, and she wished she knew him well enough to fill them with her name and a brief, cheerful message. She gave an apologetic shrug.

“Lotta homework,” she said.

THAT WAS an odd, unsettled spring for her, the first time she'd ever really been alone. Ever since Mandy left for college, Ruth had been sunk in something approaching a state of mourning. Her big sister was the one indispensable person in her life—ally, best friend, consoler, explainer of the world. They'd shared a bedroom for thirteen years, trading gossip, complaining about their parents, mumbling secrets to each other until they nodded off, then waking up together to the tinny music warbling out of the clock radio on the table between their beds. With Mandy away, the house seemed perpetually out-of-whack—distressingly tidy and much too quiet, as if something more than a single person had been subtracted from the whole.

It hadn't been so bad for the first couple of months. Mandy called most nights and came home every other weekend, full of fascinating new information and unusually strong opinions. But then, at Thanksgiving, she solemnly informed the family that she'd fallen in love—she delivered this announcement at the dinner table, with an air of self-importance that Ruth had found both thrilling and vaguely sickening— and since then, she hadn't come home at all, except for an obligatory couple of days at Christmas. Now Ruth considered herself lucky if she spoke to her sister once a week, and when she did, Mandy's mind was a thousand miles away; she couldn't even fake an interest in the details of Ruth's pathetic teen dramas. All she wanted to talk about was Desmond, the Irish grad student with the beautiful eyes and soulful voice, who had awakened her to the suffering and injustice of the world. They were planning on traveling to Nicaragua over the summer to see the Sandinista Revolution for themselves, to cut through the fog of lies and propaganda spewed out by the American government and its toadies in the media.

Great, thought Ruth. And I'll be home with Mom and Dad, waitressing at the IHOP.

It wasn't that Ruth had a bad relationship with her parents, at least not compared to a lot of kids she knew. They weren't especially strict or even normally vigilant; for the most part, they trusted her to make her own decisions about who she hung out with, where she went, and what time she came home. It probably helped that Ruth got good grades, didn't have a boyfriend, and rarely got invited to parties.

She had only one real problem with her parents, but it was a big one: they were just so depressing. With Mandy around, she had barely noticed. Now, though, Ruth had no choice but to observe her mother and father during their interminable, mostly silent family dinners, and wonder how it was possible that two reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent people could sleep in the same bed and have so little interest in what the other was thinking or feeling. They rarely spoke a kind or curious word to each other, and hardly ever laughed when they were together. They did kiss good-bye in the morning, but the act seemed utterly mechanical, no more tender or meaningful than when her father patted his back pocket on the way out the door to make sure his wallet was there. They paid so little attention to each other that a stranger might have assumed they'd been randomly assigned to live together, roommates who wanted nothing more than to keep out of each other's way.

It hadn't always been like this, though. Ruth had the photographic evidence to prove it—wedding albums, honeymoon snapshots, happy family portraits from when she and her sister were little. In the old pictures, her mother and father smiled, they touched, they looked at each other. So what happened? Every now and then, when Ruth was alone with her mother, she tried to find out.

“Is something wrong? Are you and Dad mad at each other?”

“Not at all. Everything's fine.”

“Fine? You never even talk to him.”

“We talk all the time. We have a very good relationship.”

Conversations like this made Ruth glad her mother had gone back to work full-time, which meant that she at least had a few hours to herself when she got home from school, some time to mellow out and do her homework in peace. It hadn't mattered so much in the fall, when Ruth had been a jayvee cheerleader, an activity that kept her busy in the afternoons and gave her a ready-made social life. But she'd hung up her pompoms at the end of football season—she just wasn't peppy enough—and immediately found herself exiled from the clique of pretty, popular girls she'd drifted into freshman year, coasting on the widespread misconception that she was a younger version of Mandy, who actually was a pretty and popular varsity cheerleader, though she now regretted it on feminist grounds.

All Ruth really knew as that fateful April cracked open was that she was living in a kind of limbo, a waiting period between what had happened before and what would happen next. Temporarily sisterless and friendless, she spent a lot of time in a state of vague anticipation, staring at the phone, willing it to ring, hoping to hear a friendly voice on the other end, a mystery boy who confessed that he'd been watching her and thinking about her, and wouldn't she like to put away her homework and maybe have a little fun?

SO IT was nice to suddenly have a regular date with Paul Caruso, even if it didn't amount to anything more than a fifteen-minute walk home from the bus stop. They hit it off right away, slipping easily past the awkwardness of the first day into a realm of relaxed intimacy that made her feel like they'd been friends for years instead of neighbors who'd barely acknowledged each other's existence until a few days ago.

He confided in her about his troubles with Missy, who'd become increasingly clingy as they approached the end of high school. They were heading to different colleges—she'd been recruited to play soft-ball at the U. of Delaware; he was going to major in Music at William Paterson—and Paul had no illusions that they could survive as a couple beyond the end of summer. But Missy was adamant about committing to a long-distance relationship.

“It never works,” he told her. “Have you ever heard of a case where it works?”

Ruth liked the serious way he asked these questions, as if she were a mature adult with a wide experience of the world, someone he could count on for good advice.

“It didn't work for my sister,” she said. “And she and Rich were only an hour apart. I guess she just wanted to make a fresh start or something.”

“That's kinda how I'm feeling,” Paul admitted. “But I don't know how to say it. Missy's just so emotional these days. She cries over every little thing.”

Ruth usually considered herself a compassionate person, but she found it impossible to scrape up any sympathy for Missy, who refused to say hi to her in the halls even though they'd spent several Saturday mornings together in the fall, sorting glass and metal at the Recycling Center. Ruth just hated that, the way someone could be so nice to you one day, then cut you dead the next.

“She's probably just scared,” Ruth speculated. “About going away and everything.”

“Personally, I can't wait. I mean, don't you think it gets a little boring around here?”

“A little?” she said, and he gave a knowing laugh that made her feel thrillingly conspiratorial, like the two of them knew something that crybaby Missy didn't.

Every day she followed him inside and set his backpack and trumpet down on the kitchen table, then suffered through an excruciating moment of suspense, waiting for him to ask if she'd like a sandwich or a soda, or even a glass of ice water, but he never did. It was as if he'd taken her refusal on the first day as a statement of principle, a philosophical objection to food and drink.

THE WEATHER turned warm at the end of April, a glorious stretch of perfect days—birdsong, blue sky, blossoms dropping from fruit trees in little blizzards of pink and green. If Ruth had owned a dog, she would've taken it for a walk, but instead she changed into terry-cloth gym shorts and a T-shirt, spread a beach towel out on the lawn of her backyard, and lay down on top of it, her face to the sun. She could hear the sound of Paul's trumpet wafting out from his bedroom window, quivering in the air above her. He was playing a jazzed-up version of “My Favorite Things,” and she let herself imagine that he was watching her from his window, including her among the raindrops and roses and brown-paper packages.

Even at that age—especially at that age—Ruth wasn't in the habit of thinking of herself as beautiful. At best, she figured, she was a 6 on the 1-10 scale that lots of ugly, obnoxious boys were happy to use on girls, but wouldn't have dreamed of applying to themselves. She believed that she deserved an above-average score due to the fact that there was nothing obviously wrong with her—she had a decent body and an okay face, no weird moles or facial hair or skin problems, nothing disfigured or bizarrely out of proportion. On the other hand, she lacked any of the truly outstanding features that would have qualified for the top group—her boobs were little, her face “cute” rather than “pretty,” her hair mousy and a bit limp. You developed a fairly realistic assessment of yourself growing up in the shadow of an older sister who'd been turning the heads of grown men since she was twelve. If Mandy had been out here in her string bikini—she was a devoted sun worshipper, always happy for an excuse to show some skin—Ruth would've made sure to stay far away, out of range of unkind comparisons. But today she was alone, without a doubt the prettiest girl in the yard, and she wished she'd been brave enough to wear a bathing suit or at least a tube top, to allow her body to be appreciated on its own modest terms.

She picked up the copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that she'd checked out of the library on Paul's recommendation, and tried to get started. But it was hard to coax her mind into visualizing an imaginary reality when the one right in front of her was so vividly and insistently alive—the marshmallow clouds drifting overhead, the garden ducks pinwheeling their wooden wings in the breeze, the inchworm making its ticklish journey up her shin. At some point she realized that the music had stopped, and couldn't keep herself from casting an anxious glance at Paul's bedroom window. But all she saw was the sunlight reflecting off the glass, a blinding glare where his face would've been.

THE NEXT day they were careful with each other on the way home from school, less talkative than usual. They had already turned onto their block by the time Paul asked her if she was enjoying the Tom Robbins novel.

“I'm not really sure,” she said. “I tried to read it yesterday, but I couldn't concentrate.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I guess my mind was on other things.”

“That's weird,” he said. “I was trying to practice my trumpet and the same thing happened to me. Couldn't keep my mind on the music.”

“Spring fever.”

“Must be.”

Her heart felt big and jumpy as she followed him into the kitchen, certain that they'd crossed a point of no return. She set his stuff on the table and turned to him with a solemn expression.

“So,” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

She didn't really know where to go from here, how you got from the talking to the rest of it, and he seemed just as baffled as she was, though he had less excuse, being older and more experienced. They stared at each other until the silence got embarrassing. She addressed her next question to the floor.

“I guess you have to practice, huh?”

“An hour a day.”

“You're really disciplined.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Will you be out in the yard?”

“Probably.” She hesitated for a moment, giving him one more chance to save her. “I guess I better go, huh?”

All he had to do was say, No, don't go. Stay here with me for a while. But he didn't say anything, didn't make the smallest gesture to stop her, which made it impossible for her to do anything but leave. She could feel the frustration in his eyes as she headed for the door. It was painful, like being trapped in a bad dream where all you had to do was say one thing, but you didn't know the words.

RUTH LAY down on her towel in a purple one-piece bathing suit and pretended to read. It was a kind of torture, knowing how close he was, how simple it would be if she could only find the courage to take matters into her own hands, to walk across the lawn and ring his doorbell.

He was playing his trumpet again, but it was just scales, no more songs that might be secret messages, and the mechanical up-and-down-and-up of it started to drive her a little crazy, as monotonous as a chain saw or an ice-cream-truck jingle. She rolled onto her stomach, sealed her ears with her index fingers, and forced herself to concentrate on the novel. The story was ridiculous—something about a girl with big thumbs and her friend named Bonanza Jellybean—and it suddenly seemed like Paul had made a fool of her, convincing her to lie outside in a bathing suit and read this stupid book for nothing.

For nothing.

She cried out in frustration and scrambled to her feet, leaving the towel and the book behind as she hurried across the lawn to her house. She had just reached the patio when she heard a window being raised. Paul poked his head outside, peering down at her from the second floor.

“Ruthie,” he said. He'd never called her that before, and she felt a warm blush spreading across her face.

“Yeah?”

“The back door's open.”

WHAT AMAZED her wasn't that she went to him, crossing the lawn in her bathing suit, letting herself in, and climbing the stairs to his bedroom. That part of it was a foregone conclusion, all she'd been waiting for since the first day they had walked home together. What amazed her was what she did when she got there.

It was mystifying, really She was a month away from her sixteenth birthday, and still fairly innocent, at least compared to a lot of girls she knew. She'd played a few rounds of spin-the-bottle in junior high, and had kissed three different boys in her first two years of high school. The most recent one, Scott Molloy, had touched her breasts, but only briefly, and only through her bra.

Ruth really didn't know how to account for the recklessness—the complete absence of fear—that came over her the moment she stepped into his room. He just looked so harmless—so sweet and nervous— sitting on the bed, the trumpet resting on his bedside table next to a bag of Ruffles, his injured foot propped on a pillow. He started to say something complicated—it was part apology for keeping her waiting so long, mixed in with guilty mutterings about Missy—but she shushed him with a kiss and started fumbling with his belt. His mouth tasted like tuna on rye.

“Ruth?” His voice trembled slightly, as if she were about to burn him with a cigarette. “What are you doing?”

“Let's find out,” she told him.

It had something to do with Mandy, Ruth understood that much, because she had the distinct impression that her sister was watching her, an invisible third person in the room, smiling with approval as she unzipped Paul's fly and tugged his pants down to his knees, nodding in encouragement as she peeled off her bathing suit and tossed it on the floor.

“Ruth?” Paul said again. “Are you sure—”

She pressed a finger to his lips as she climbed on top of him.

Go ahead, Mandy seemed to say. Don't be afraid. It'll only hurt a little, and then it'll get better.

“It's okay,” she whispered, reaching down and guiding him inside. And it did hurt, a lot more than she'd expected, though she tried not to show it, still keenly aware of the sensation of being judged by her sister, of proving herself to a beloved teacher.

Because, of course, that was how Ruth had learned everything she knew, lying in bed at night, listening drowsy and aroused to Mandy's half-sheepish, half-triumphant confessions about what she had and hadn't done with this boy or that—the first time she made Billy Frelinghausen hard with her hand, the first time she used her mouth on Danny Wirth, the night she lost her virginity in Rich Lodi's parents’ bedroom, with a gallery of family photos smiling down upon her.

But this is different, Ruth thought, as Paul released a series of astonished grunts beneath her. Mandy had been working up to that for years, taking things one step at a time, inching methodically toward the goal line. She'd had serious boyfriends since eighth grade, and had somehow managed to postpone sexual intercourse all the way to the end of high school, and to save herself for a boy she really believed she loved.

“Ho, God!” Paul shouted. He seemed to have overcome his doubts, and was bucking his hips wildly, almost like he was trying to throw her off the bed. “Holy shit!”

For as long as she could remember, Ruth had felt herself trailing far behind her sister, so far that she couldn't even see her anymore. But now, in a matter of just a few minutes, in a single giant leap forward, she'd gotten herself all caught up.

“Jesus.” Paul stared at her in bewilderment when it was over. His face was slick with sweat, his hair plastered against his cheek. “I just thought we were gonna make out a little.”

IT LASTED for a little over two weeks. There was a feverish quality to those stolen afternoons that Ruth had never forgotten, a hectic intensity that left her feeling exalted, set apart from the world.

They'd head straight to his bedroom after school, yank down the shades, and pick up right where they'd left off the day before. Because of his limited mobility, Paul spent most of this time flat on his back, with his shirt still on (he was shy about his body) and his pants down around his knees (it was a big production to get them off over the cast), staring up at Ruth with an expression of awestruck gratitude as she sat astride his waist, basking in his admiration. He couldn't believe his good luck, couldn't believe that something so miraculous had been made possible by a broken ankle.

“It seemed like such a drag at the time,” he said. “But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You mean it?”

“Nothing even comes close.”

At four o'clock she'd kiss him good-bye and head home, her body ripe and sore and unfamiliar, a subject of constant fascination. Sometimes she'd shower, but usually not—it was exciting to possess a sexual aura, to move around inside the memory of what she'd just done, an outlaw in her own house. Schoolwork was out of the question, so she occupied herself by cooking dinner, singing along with the radio as she peeled the potatoes or tossed the salad. Even her mother, usually so dense and indifferent, noticed that something was afoot.

“You seem so cheerful lately,” she said. “If I didn't know better, I might think someone had a boyfriend.”

“Yeah, right.” Ruth rolled her eyes.

“Pretty soon,” her mother told her. “Just you wait.”

IF SHE'D been a character in one of JoAnn Marlow's abstinence fables, Ruth thought, she would have paid dearly for that brief interlude of after-school pleasure, and spent the rest of her life enshrined in a cautionary anecdote: Poor Ruth, who found out she was pregnant on her sixteenth birthday; Poor Ruth, who went blind from a rare venereal disease; Poor Ruth, who was exposed as the little slut she was, and driven out of her own high school….

And it could have happened, of course, at least the pregnancy. In all their time together, Paul had never once used a condom, and Ruth never asked him to; it just seemed out of the question somehow, too bald and practical, as if they were operating in the real world of choices and consequences, rather than this sealed-off dream capsule where you could do whatever you wanted and not worry about anything. Sexually transmitted diseases, on the other hand, were a nonissue; Paul turned out to be as inexperienced as she was, though his virginity was more a matter of his girlfriend's preference than his own.

Missy won't do that, was a constant refrain on those afternoons, a phrase that not only applied to actual sex, but to less momentous stuff like ear-licking, or finger-sucking, or letting Paul see what you looked like in just your underwear and socks. She thinks it's gross.

“Why don't you break up with her?” Ruth asked.

“I can't do it now,” he explained. “Not this close to graduation.”

SHE HAD only one bad memory from those days, but it had stuck with her over the years, its power undiminished by the passage of time. It happened on a warm evening near the end of school, a couple of weeks after Paul's cast came off and he was reclaimed by real life, Missy, and the marching band. Ruth was in the kitchen, helping her mother clean up after dinner when her father called from the living room.

“Hey, get a load of this.”

What he wanted them to see was the white stretch limo parked in front of the Carusos’. A small crowd of curious neighbors had gathered around to admire the vehicle—it was gleaming in the dusk, giving off a soft shimmery luster—some of them chatting with the uniformed driver, others circling the car, peering into the windows and kicking the tires, as if they were thinking about buying one for themselves.

“Must be the prom,” Ruth's mother said.

Ruth's father was a man who liked to know what was going on. Whenever an ambulance or fire truck appeared on Peony Road, no matter what time of day or night, he headed out to investigate, buttonholing as many bystanders and emergency workers as he could, then returning home with the bulletin: Mrs. Rapinksi was short of breath, it was a grease fire in the oven, the old man felt dizzy. Ruth wasn't surprised to see him putting on his shoes.

“This oughta be interesting,” he said.

“Who's his date?” her mother asked. “Is it that big girl? The baseball player?”

“How should I know?” Ruth snapped.

Her parents headed outside, unable to resist the glamorous pull of prom night. Ruth stayed in, staring out the window, wishing she had the courage to return to the kitchen and continue loading the dishwasher but finding it impossible to turn away from the spectacle.

The limo driver—he was an older man with a carefully expressionless face—had just pulled out a handkerchief and begun rubbing at something on the windshield when the people around him began to clap, as if applauding his diligence. It took Ruth a moment to realize that Paul and Missy must have just emerged from the house, though she couldn't see them from where she stood. Even with her face pressed against the glass, her field of vision only encompassed the bottom half of the front lawn, where Paul's father and another man—a burly guy in a windbreaker who must have been Missy's dad—were kneeling and snapping flash pictures.

Onlookers shouted out jokey-sounding comments that Ruth couldn't quite make out; she saw her own mother and father laughing on the sidewalk. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore, the sense of being cut off from the action, of being stuck in here while it was all happening out there.

She headed for the front door, hesitating for a moment as she took stock of her unflattering outfit—baggy sweatpants and an old South-side Johnny T-shirt inherited from her sister—nothing you'd want to be seen wearing in public. She wondered if there was time to at least grab a jean jacket from her room or run a brush through her hair, but there wasn't.

She stepped onto her porch just in time to see Paul and Missy making their way toward the limo, where the driver was waiting, holding the back door open and extending an eloquent gesture of invitation with his free hand. They stopped by the curb, posing for one last photo, Paul bulky and imposing in his rented tux, Missy a bit awkward in a sleeveless orange dress with a poufy skirt, a tight bodice—an unwieldy corsage had been pinned directly over her left breast—and spaghetti straps that emphasized the powerful girth of her shoulders. Her blond French twist seemed strangely luminous, almost iridescent, as she kissed Paul on the cheek, straightened his bow tie, and then ducked into the car. He was just about to follow her when he turned suddenly, as if drawn by Ruth's gaze, and looked straight at her.

That moment of eye contact couldn't have lasted more than a second or two, just long enough for Ruth to see that he'd gotten a haircut— nothing drastic, just a trim of a couple inches all around—and to notice his peculiar expression, as if his face had gotten stuck halfway between a fake smile for the cameras and a mute apology to her.

Or maybe she was imagining the apology part, because what did he have to apologize for? Ruth wasn't his girlfriend, never had been. They'd just had some fun, and now it was over. She had no right to be jealous, no right to wish herself inside the limo in a pretty dress after having just been applauded by her neighbors, no right to call out and ask him to reconsider, to remember how he'd stroked her hair and told her that she was the kind of girl guys wrote love songs about.

He held his arms close to his body and shrugged, as if to say there was nothing he could do. She had the feeling he was about to say something, but the limo driver stepped in before he had the chance, placing his hand on Paul's shoulder and guiding him gently into the car. He was still looking at her as the door slammed shut, his face baffled and unhappy, then lost behind the tinted window.

Who Do We Appreciate?

RUTH ARRIVED LATE AND MILDLY HUNGOVER FOR HER DAUGHTER'S soccer game on Saturday morning. Smiling queasily, she made her way down the sideline, nodding hello to the more punctual parents, many of whom she hadn't seen in quite a while. A few of the spectators were sitting in collapsible chairs, but most were on their feet, chatting in sociable clumps as they sipped from state-of-the-art, stainless-steel travel mugs, giving the whole scene the air of an outdoor cocktail party.

As usual, Ruth's ex-husband, Frank, had removed himself from the talkers, his attention focused solely on the game. He stood like the baseball player he'd once been—knees bent, hands resting on his thighs— observing the action with an expression of intense absorption that Ruth might have mistaken for disgust if she hadn't known him so well.

“Morning,” she said, tugging gently on his sleeve. “How we doing?”

“Tied at two,” he muttered, shooting her a reproachful glance. “First half's almost over. Maggie thought you forgot.”

“I overslept.”

“Ever hear of an alarm clock?”

“Didn't go off,” she explained, leaving out the part about how she'd unplugged the thing in a fit of three-in-the-morning insomniac misery. Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

“Come on, blue!” Frank bellowed through the loudspeaker of his cupped hands. “Move the ball! You're dragging out there!”

Ruth squinted at the field, cursing herself for forgetting her sunglasses. She'd actually had them on the first time she left the house, but she'd decided to dart back inside for one final pit stop, knowing all too well that once she got to the game, her only alternative would be an off-kilter Port-A-Potty at the edge of the woods. She must have removed her shades to use the toilet—not that she couldn't pee perfectly well in the dark—because they were no longer on her face when she pulled into the gravel parking area at Shackamackan Park.

“Candace!” Frank had both hands above his head and was waving them like one of those guys with the sticks on the airport tarmac. “You're sweeper! Get back!”

Candace Roper, a very pretty girl whom Maggie had known since preschool, had drifted up near midfield, apparently unaware that one of her opponents—they wore shiny yellow jerseys with the word Comets emblazoned on the front—had slipped behind her and would have a clear path to the goal if her teammates could get her the ball. Candace glanced over her shoulder, clapped one hand over her mouth in guilty surprise, then scampered back into position.

“Jesus,” he said. “We're sleepwalking out here.”

“Where's Eliza?”

Frank jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Ruth turned to see her older daughter sitting at a picnic table beneath a fiery red maple that had already lost half its leaves. She was engrossed in a magazine, most likely a back issue of O or Martha Stewart Living that Frank's lady friend, Meredith, made a point of passing along, knowing how much she enjoyed them. Ruth waved and called out a greeting, but Eliza didn't notice—probably too busy boning up on recipes for low-fat crème brûlée or color schemes to beat those stubborn winter blahs. Ruth watched her for a moment, struggling against the combination of exasperation and pity that Eliza so often provoked in her. She was fourteen going on forty, for God's sake. Wasn't it past time for a little adolescent rebellion?

“Come on, ref!” Frank slapped his thigh. “Open your eyes! She's throwing elbows!”

“Easy,” Ruth warned him. Both her daughters had recently complained about their father's obnoxious behavior at soccer games. “You're not allowed to harass the referees.”

“Number fourteen's going to hurt someone!” he continued, as if Ruth hadn't said a word. “She's playing like a thug!”

He yelled this loudly enough that the thug in question—a big, rosy-cheeked girl who wore her blond hair in Valkyrie-style braids— turned and gaped at him, her arms spread wide in a gesture of puzzled innocence.

“That's right, honey!” Frank jabbed an accusatory finger. “I'm watching you!”

“Enough,” Ruth said. “She's just a kid.”

She spoke more forcefully this time, and Frank actually listened. His expression turned sheepish, and he shook his head, as if trying to clear away the cobwebs.

“Sorry. Sometimes I get a little worked up.”

“No kidding.”

“It's crazy. These Bridgeton girls are a bunch of bruisers. What're they putting in the milk over there?”

It was true, Ruth realized. The Comets were unusually big for their age—aside from one nimble Asian girl, they looked like a tribe of Viking warrior maidens—and they played a tough physical game, lots of pushing and shoving and body-checking. But you had to give Maggie's team credit; what they lacked in size they made up for in quickness and skill, frequently beating their opponents to the ball and moving upheld in a rat-a-tat-tat series of pinpoint passes. If not for several spectacular but risky saves by the Comets’ goalie, who had no qualms about coming way out of the net to challenge the shooter, Stonewood Heights would have held a commanding lead.

Ruth was especially impressed by her daughter's performance. Maggie had always been a natural athlete, but in the past she'd seemed oddly tentative in the field, too polite for her own good. If a girl on the other team wanted the ball badly enough, Maggie would just stand aside and let her have it. Today, though, she was playing with a competitive fire that took Ruth by surprise, a beady-eyed intensity uncannily similar to her father's. She was all over the field, leading the breaks on offense, helping out on defense, fighting fiercely for control of the ball. She talked a lot during the game, barking incomprehensible instructions to her teammates—she wore a mouthpiece to protect her orthodontia—who seemed to understand exactly what she wanted from them.

“Wow,” said Ruth. “She's come a long way.”

Frank nodded. “She's been like this all season.”

UNTIL HER divorce, Ruth had been a dutiful soccer mom, surrendering countless Saturday mornings to the dubious pleasures of watching little kids kick a ball up and down a grassy field, often in unpleasant weather. Now that Frank had the girls on Saturday, though, he'd become point man for weekend sporting events, a piece of parental turf Ruth had surrendered without complaint. God knew she spent enough time ferrying the girls back and forth to various lessons, practices, and friends’ houses during the rest of the week.

Besides, Frank enjoyed the games more than she did, especially once Maggie began qualifying for the stronger teams. In the past couple of years, he'd become her advisor, practice partner, and biggest fan; besides taking her to numerous high-school and college games, he supervised her development, enrolling her in instructional clinics and expensive summer programs (this past July, she'd spent two weeks at a sleepaway camp run by former members of the USA Women's National Team). Eliza—a lackluster athlete who'd quit sports as soon as she was given a choice—frequently complained about Frank's favoritism toward her little sister, how all he could talk about was Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, soccer, soccer, soccer.

The irony of this was not lost on Ruth, who remembered quite vividly just how disappointed Frank had been to have a second daughter, rather than a son he could “play ball with.” He used this phrase all the time, as if male children existed for the sole purpose of playing ball with their fathers. He pressured Ruth to reconsider the two-child policy that had been in place since the beginning of their marriage, and changed his mind about going in for the vasectomy he'd agreed to get once they reached their quota.

In retrospect, Ruth could see that Maggie's birth had marked the beginning of the end of their marriage. Slowly but inexorably, Frank began drifting away. Without consulting her, he signed up for graduate courses in Education, and threw himself into his studies with an energy that would have seemed admirable under other circumstances, earning his Master's in Administration in only two years while holding down a full-time teaching job. Only his family life suffered, but Ruth understood that that was the whole point—he'd gone back to school precisely so he could get the hell out of that house full of females, away from the unendurable torment of not having a boy to play ball with.

But now he had a girl to play ball with, and everything was forgiven. Ruth didn't begrudge him the pleasure, or his closeness to Maggie, not anymore. As far as she was concerned, he was welcome to stand out in the rain and scream at the refs to his heart's content, as long as it allowed her to spend her Saturday mornings waking up slowly in a warm, quiet house. This privilege had seemed doubly luxurious during the dark days of last spring's Sex Ed scandal, when running the gauntlet of concerned soccer parents ranked somewhere beneath oral surgery on Ruth's list of Fun Things to Do.

Maggie had seemed perfectly fine with this parental division of labor until a couple of months ago, when she'd been chosen to play for the Stonewood Stars, the town's elite traveling team for girls eleven and under. It was a high honor, and it had made her happier than Ruth had ever seen her. She slept in her team jersey—royal blue with a white star over the heart—and wore it every day in the yard, where she spent an hour dribbling between cones and kicking the ball against the side of the garage. And every Friday, just before Frank came to take her and Eliza for the weekend, Maggie would remind Ruth about the game on Saturday, and beg her to please come and watch her play, and this week Ruth had finally run out of excuses.

THE SCORE was still tied at halftime, but the Stars seemed relaxed and silly on the sideline, as if they'd already won. Several players were fussing over a black Lab puppy with a purple bandana around its neck; three others were teaching a dance routine—it combined elements of the Macarena, the Swim, and the Bump—to their coaches, an incongruous pair who seemed genuinely interested in mastering the complicated sequence of moves. After a moment of uncertainty, Ruth recognized the bulkier of the two men as John Roper, Candace's dad, though he'd lost most of his hair and put on about fifty pounds since she'd first seen him dropping off his daughter at Little Learners seven years ago. She didn't know the other coach—he was younger, unexpectedly hippieish for Stonewood Heights, a small compact man whose dark hair could easily have been gathered into a respectable ponytail.

Oblivious to the festivities, Maggie sat on the grass nearby, caught up in conversation with her friend, Nadima, a Pakistani-American girl with huge brown eyes and disconcertingly skinny legs. Nadima was scowling thoughtfully, nodding the way you do when you want your friend to know that you understand what she's saying and sympathize with her position, even if you don't completely agree with her. Ruth approached cautiously, hoping she might be able to overhear a few scraps of their conversation—they looked so endearingly serious, like grown women discussing a complicated relationship or a thorny problem at work—but her cover was blown by Hannah Friedman, who glanced up while scratching the puppy's belly.

“Hi, Mrs. Maggie's mother!” she called out, in a loud, stagey voice. Unlike most of the girls on the team—they were eleven and under, after all—Hannah had already begun to develop real breasts and an annoying adolescent personality to go along with them.

“Hi,” Ruth replied, uncomfortably aware of several faces turning in her direction at once. “You girls are doing great.”

With a startled cry of delight, Maggie scrambled to her feet and rushed over to her mother, greeting her with a hug several orders of magnitude stronger than usual. Ruth squeezed back, feeling the clamminess of her daughter's skin through the mesh weave of her jersey.

“Mommy!” Maggie's voice sounded as theatrical as Hannah's, but her eyes were full of honest emotion. “Thanks for coming.”

“Happy to be here,” Ruth told her. “I'm sorry it took so long.”

Maggie stepped back from the embrace, tugging at her uniform to get everything back in order. Ruth was unexpectedly moved by the sight of her, as if she were being offered a glimpse of two Maggies at once: the little girl she still was—a dirty-kneed tomboy straight out of Norman Rockwell—and the happy, confident young woman she was already on her way to becoming.

“Did you see when I scored?” she asked, kicking an imaginary ball. “The goalie dove, but it went right through her hands.”

Ruth frowned an apology. “I'm sorry, honey, I got here a little late. But I can't believe how well you're playing. You're like the Energizer Bunny out there. I'm so proud of you.”

“You should be,” said a man's voice. “She's our spark plug.”

Ruth turned and saw the long-haired coach approaching with a friendly expression and a slight bounce in his step, probably a byproduct of the dance lesson.

“Can I interest you in an apple slice?” he asked, extending a Tupperware container. “The girls barely made a dent.”

Maggie took one, but Ruth declined.

“You sure?” The coach looked a bit put out by her refusal. “They're nice and fresh. I squeeze lemon juice on 'em so they don't turn brown.”

“Good thinking,” said Ruth. “Can't go wrong with lemon juice.”

Nodding as if she'd uttered a profound truth, the coach shifted the container to his left hand and extended his right.

“Tim Mason. I'm the fearless leader of this motley crew.”

They shook. His hand was unusually large and a lot warmer than hers.

“I'm Ruth. Maggie's mother.”

Keeping a firm grip on Ruth's hand, Tim Mason studied her face, as if she were a good friend he hadn't seen in a long time. Up close, he looked older than she'd expected, at least forty. Some gray hair. Crow's-feet. A certain wariness around the eyes.

“I've heard a lot about you,” he said.

Ruth chuckled nervously, glad she'd taken the time to shower and put on makeup before leaving the house.

“Good things, I hope.”

Tim Mason didn't answer, nor did he loosen his grip. He just kept staring at Ruth, the moment stretching out, the air smelling like apples.

“It means a lot to her that you're here,” he said. “I know how much she's missed you.”

When he released her hand, Ruth felt relieved and vaguely let down at the same time.

“Well, thanks for coaching,” she said. “I know it's a big time commitment.”

“I love it,” he said, turning to Maggie and ruffling her hair. “We got a great buncha kids.”

* * *

RUTH WASN'T sure why the brief encounter with Tim Mason had left her so flustered. It was nothing, really, just some innocuous small talk and a handshake that lasted a little too long with a guy she wasn't even sure she found all that attractive (he was handsome enough, but she always found something vaguely off-putting about long hair on a middle-aged man). And yet here she was, all hot and bothered at the beginning of the second half, staring right through the players on the field to the coach on the far sideline—he was holding a clipboard, banging it against his leg like a tambourine—unable to think of anything but the pressure of his palm against hers and the way time seemed to stop when he looked into her eyes.

It was embarrassing, she understood that, pining for your daughter's married soccer coach—oh, she'd checked for the ring; she always checked for the ring—possibly a new low. Not that it was her fault. This was the kind of thing that happened when you went without sex for too long. After a while, any scrap of male attention—a wry smile, a kind word, the faintest whiff of flirtation—was enough to create a full-blown disturbance in your love-starved brain. A guy says, “Excuse me” in the supermarket, well, he must be the One, your Last Chance for Happiness. Or barring that—because happiness was a pretty tall order—your last chance for a normally unhappy life where somebody at least touches you every week or two.

What made it more ridiculous was that it wasn't even midmorning yet, and Tim Mason was already her second Last Chance of the day. During the night, she'd gotten so worked up thinking about Paul Caruso and their long-lost interlude of secret passion—Hadn't they shared something special? Wasn't it a pity that they'd fallen out of touch?— that she'd done something she already regretted. Dragging herself out of bed at three-thirty in the morning, she'd logged on to Classmates.com and posted a query on the Oakhurst Regional High message board: “Does anyone know how to get in touch with Paul Caruso, class of '80? He was a trumpet player who lived on Peony Road.”

What was that, six hours ago? And already, she'd dumped her old lover for a hippie soccer coach who would undoubtedly be replaced by the surly Russian guy with liquor on his breath who pumped her gas at the Hess station. Is this what it's going to be like for the rest of my life, Ruth wondered, one unrequited fantasy after another until I shrivel up and die?

SHE WAS rescued from this unrewarding line of inquiry by the sudden appearance at her side of Arlene Zabel, a striking woman of about fifty, whose daughter, Louisa, played goalie for the Stars. Arlene had long gray hair that only heightened your awareness of how youthful she looked otherwise—her body trim and girlish, her face lively and unlined.

“Ruth,” she said. “It's been ages.”

Ruth agreed that it had. Arlene gave her an approving once-over as they exchanged pleasantries.

“You look terrific. Did you lose weight?”

“I've been running,” Ruth explained. “Mainly just to keep sane.”

Arlene nodded sympathetically, as if she understood exactly why Ruth might have needed to take steps to preserve her sanity. She was a tax-attorney-turned-massage-therapist—a true renegade, given the narrow parameters of acceptable adult conduct in Stonewood Heights— and Ruth had always considered her a kindred spirit.

“I've been meaning to call you for months,” Arlene said. “But you know how it is. Mel's been traveling for work, and I run around so much, I barely have time to breathe.”

“That's okay,” Ruth told her. “I've been pretty busy myself.”

The falseness of the moment was painfully apparent to both of them. Four years ago, they'd been good friends. They had each other's families over for dinner, went on double dates with their husbands, took the kids to movies, museums, and amusement parks. But Frank had known Mel since high school, and it was tacitly understood by everyone involved that he would get custody of the Zabels after the divorce. Ruth and Arlene tried to sustain an independent friendship for a while, but it had petered out after a couple of melancholy coffee dates.

“It's a shame what they did to you,” Arlene said. “You didn't deserve to be raked over the coals like that.”

“Thanks.” Ruth appreciated the sentiment, though she would have appreciated it a whole lot more a few months ago, back when the coals were still burning.

“I don't know where all these Bible Thumpers are coming from,” Arlene said. “I mean, they didn't used to be so—uh-oh!”

Ruth looked up just in time to see one of the Comets steal the ball from Nadima and boot it upheld to the Asian girl. A roar of anticipation went up from the Bridgeton fans as their star offensive player dribbled past Hannah Friedman and broke for the net. Alone in the goal, Louisa Zabel seemed jittery, uncertain whether to hold her ground or rush forward and force a shot.

“Oh God,” Arlene said, grabbing hold of Ruth's wrist.

The Asian girl had a wide-open shot from ten feet out, but she drilled the ball straight at Louisa, who swatted it away with her gloved hands, then dove for the rebound, curling her body around the ball before the shooter could follow up.

“Way to go, Lou-Lou!” Arlene screamed. “Get it out of there!”

Louisa leapt to her feet, sprinted forward, and flung the ball almost to midfield.

“Wow,” said Ruth. “She's got quite an arm.”

“This game's gonna give me a heart attack,” Arlene said. “What was I saying?”

“The Bible Thumpers?”

“Ah, forget it.” She waved her hand in disgust. “I'm sick of talking about it. The whole world's going nuts.”

“It's the kids who are being cheated,” Ruth pointed out. “You got a small group of fanatics telling everybody else what they can and can't do, what they should and shouldn't read or talk about. Where's it gonna end?”

“I wish it were a small group of fanatics. I'm starting to think there's more of them than us. I mean, they're running the country.”

“It's only because they're louder. The people on our side aren't speaking out. It's like we're a bunch of wimps who don't believe in anything.”

The Stars had a throw-in. Nadima raised the ball high over her head and heaved it into an empty space in the center of the field, a little bit ahead of one of her teammates—a quick, dark-haired girl Ruth had never seen before—who came streaking out of nowhere to meet it. Unfortunately, one of the Comets—Number 14, with the Wagnerian braids—arrived from the opposite direction at exactly the same time. It was a sickening thing to watch: the two players crashing into each other at full speed, both going down hard.

The bigger girl got up right away—she was crying and clutching her midsection—but Maggie's teammate remained motionless on the grass. Tim Mason and John Roper came running onto the field before the ref had even blown the whistle.

“Who got hurt?” Ruth asked.

“That's Abby, Tim's daughter.” Arlene drew an anxious breath. “I hope she's okay. Last week, a girl from Willard Falls broke her collarbone. They had to take her away in an ambulance.”

The players took a knee while the coaches attended to Abby. Tim Mason crouched at his daughter's side, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. He addressed a worried comment to his assistant, who nodded grimly, and signaled to the ref. By this point, the Bridgeton coach had wandered onto the field to see if he could help.

“This is scary,” Arlene said.

At almost the same moment, though, Tim's face broke into a dazzling smile of relief as Abby pushed herself into sitting position and held out a hand. In a single smooth motion, her father hoisted her up from the ground and cradled her in his arms. He asked a question; she nodded yes. The spectators applauded as they made their way slowly across the field, like an old-fashioned bride and groom.

“He seems like a nice guy,” said Ruth.

“Who, Tim?”

“Yeah. I just met him a little while ago.”

“He's good with the girls,” Arlene said, a bit stiffly.

Ruth couldn't help herself. “I actually thought he was kinda cute. I mean, I know he's married and everything.”

“You're joking, right?”

“He's a little short,” Ruth conceded. “But he's got a good build.”

Arlene hesitated for a moment, apparently trying to decide if Ruth was pulling her leg.

“You know he's one of them, right?”

“One of who?”

“That church. Tabernacle. Whatever you call it.”

“Really? He doesn't seem the type.”

“Ask him,” Arlene said. “He'll be happy to tell you all about it.”

“Oh, shit.” Ruth laughed, remembering the way the coach had held her hand and stared into her eyes. He hadn't wanted her body. He'd wanted her soul. “I'm such an idiot.”

Arlene patted her on the shoulder.

“We gotta find you a boyfriend.”

This was no idle offer. It was Arlene who'd set Ruth up with Ray Mattingly, the divorced computer guy with whom she'd had her only serious relationship since Frank had moved out. Not that it was all that serious. They'd had a couple of bad dates, then a couple of good ones, then a lovely weekend together in the Poconos, on the way home from which he informed her that he was moving to the Research Triangle of North Carolina. He said he would've mentioned it earlier, but he hadn't wanted to spoil their trip.

“Any candidates?” Ruth asked.

“I'll give it some thought,” Arlene promised.

The ball went out of bounds off the Comets, and the Stars called for subs. Maggie was one of three girls who came sprinting onto the field.

“Thank God,” said Arlene. “Now maybe we can get some offense going. If we win today, we'll be tied for first place in Division B-3.”

RUTH DIDN'T think of herself as the kind of person who cared deeply about the outcome of a game played by fifth graders—or the standings in Division B-3, whatever that was—but even she found it impossible not to get swept up in the excitement as the clock wound down, and every play became fraught with danger and possibility. You could see the tension on the faces of the spectators—they'd abandoned their conversations and drifted en masse toward the sideline, creating an irregular human fence around the field—as well as the players, who seemed to have moved beyond fatigue into the realm of pure adrenaline. Watching them, Ruth felt a sharp pang of envy, wishing she could be out there herself—hair pulled back, shin guards tucked under her knee socks, completely alive in her body, in the moment— wishing she'd grown up at a time when sports were a routine part of a girl's life. She would be a happier person now, she was pretty sure of it. The momentum had taken a worrisome turn in the latter part of the second half. Now it was the Comets who dominated, mounting one offensive assault after another, getting off numerous solid shots on goal—including a penalty kick that ricocheted off the post—without managing to score. The Stars seemed intimidated, as if they'd given up trying to win and had decided that the best they could hope for was to run out the clock and escape with a tie.

“Come on, ladies!” Frank bellowed from down the sideline—Ruth had moved away from him in the second half, unable to cope with his enthusiasm—his voice so ragged with emotion that Ruth felt ashamed for both of them. It was simply beyond belief that she'd spent two hours with a man like that, let alone twelve years of her life. “Let's get some backbone!”

Smelling blood, but clearly frustrated at their inability to score, the Comets launched a furious last-ditch onslaught, bringing their two defenders way up past midfield to increase the pressure on the beleaguered Stars, who couldn't seem to clear the ball from out in front of their net no matter how hard they tried.

“Oh Jesus,” Arlene groaned. “This is not good.”

One of the Comets—a lanky girl with boyishly cropped blond hair—had an open shot that went wide. A few seconds later, the same girl dropped a beautiful corner kick right in front of the Stars’ goal, but Louisa reacted quickly, snatching it up on one bounce. Without a second's hesitation, she charged forward and whizzed the ball down-field, toward the right sideline. At first it seemed to Ruth that she was throwing wildly, just trying to get the ball as far away as possible, but suddenly it became clear that it was a planned maneuver, because Maggie was already far upfield, moving at full tilt, as if she'd known where the ball was going to land before it had left Louisa's hand, long before the Comets even sensed the danger.

Maggie took control of the ball near midfield, with nothing but grass between her and the goal. It looked to Ruth like one of those scenarios from a wish-fulfillment dream—one player way out front, everyone else stampeding behind, unable to catch up. When it became clear that help would arrive too late, the Comets’ goalie began moving away from the net, hoping to force a bad shot. Maggie just kept charging forward as if the goalie weren't even there, and it looked to Ruth for a second like another collision was inevitable.

“Shoot!” Frank was shouting. “Bang it in!”

But Maggie didn't shoot. With the goalie closing in on her at full speed, she kicked the ball sideways instead of straight ahead, a maneuver that made no sense to Ruth until she noticed that Candace Roper had also outrun the Comets’ pursuit and was pulling up even with Maggie just in time to receive the unexpected pass.

Candace had a little trouble getting control of the ball, giving the goalie time to whirl and make a panicky sprint back to the net, but it was too late. By the time she got there, Candace's shot—a weak dribbler that would have been an easy save under other circumstances—had already trickled across the goal line.

IT WASN'T true, as certain people insisted in the weeks that followed, that Ruth had gone to Shackamackan Park that morning looking to cause trouble. In fact, trouble was the furthest thing from her mind as the ref blew the whistle to end the game, giving the Stars a hard-fought 3-2 victory.

“We did it!” Arlene cried, hugging Ruth and jumping up and down at the same time. “I can't believe we did it!”

“What a game,” Ruth said. “The girls just didn't give up.”

She was surprised at how exhilarated she felt—proud of Maggie, mainly, but also mysteriously validated as a parent—and these good feelings even spilled over onto Frank as he approached with a cockeyed grin on his face. He looked wired, the way he used to get when he stayed up all night writing a term paper.

“Can you believe your daughter?” he asked. “Is she amazing or what?”

Ruth was about to launch into her own rhapsody of agreement, but she checked herself when she saw that Eliza had wandered over from the picnic table to join them.

“You missed quite a game,” Frank informed her.

She shrugged. “How'd Maggie do?”

“Good,” Ruth said. “They won.”

Eliza nodded, and Ruth could see the struggle it took for her to produce even a halfhearted smile.

“Cool,” she said.

Ruth's heart went out to her. Eliza was going through a rough patch. The divorce had shaken her, the newspaper stories about her mother had mortified her, and puberty had knocked her for a loop. In three years, she'd gone from being an adorable little girl to being a chunky, strangely proportioned adolescent with greasy hair—it didn't matter how often she washed it—a perpetual squint, and a mouth that hung open in a look of constant bewilderment. Her grades were mediocre, and her best friend had dumped her for a more glamorous crowd.

“She did good?” Frank asked. “Are you kidding me? She kicked ass out there.”

Eliza's only reaction was to tug her upper lip over her lower one, a strange habit she had developed in the past few months.

“Can we go now?” she asked her father. “I'm starving.”

“We didn't really have time for breakfast this morning,” Frank explained. “I promised the girls I'd take them to the diner after the game.” He hesitated, glancing first at Eliza, then at Ruth. “You can come with us if you want.”

Ruth was tempted—she would have liked to talk about the game with Maggie, and see what she could do to cheer Eliza up—but she and Frank had agreed to have as few “family” outings as possible, to avoid misleading the girls about the possibility of their getting back together.

“No thanks,” she said. “I gotta go. I'm just gonna say good-bye to Maggie.”

She kissed Eliza on the cheek, then headed across the field just as the Comets launched into their obligatory postgame cheer.

“Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Stonewood Heights, Stonewood Heights, yaaay …”

The Stars hadn't done their cheer yet; they were sitting cross-legged in a circle on the grass, holding hands, looking unexpectedly solemn as they listened to whatever it was Tim Mason and John Roper were telling them. The coaches were part of the group, and that just made it cuter—the two grown men holding hands with the complete lack of self-consciousness they'd displayed while dancing at halftime—until Ruth suddenly realized what they were doing, at which point it wasn't cute at all.

“Excuse me,” she called, quickening her pace. “Just a minute!”

Several girls turned at the sound of her voice, including Maggie. Ruth caught the warning look in her daughter's eyes, the silent plea for her to just please keep out of this, but she didn't slow down.

Tim Mason ignored her approach. He kept his eyes on the ground and spoke in a low voice.

“… and all the blessings He has bestowed upon us. Our parents, our families, all the material—”

“Hello?” Ruth interrupted. “You can't do this.”

The coach stopped talking and looked up.

“This is ridiculous,” Ruth continued. “These aren't your children.”

The glance he returned wasn't defiant, but it was calm and unwavering.

“Join us,” he said. “You're more than welcome.”

“Maggie,” Ruth said, her voice harsher than she meant it to be. “You get away from there.”

“Mom,” said Maggie.

“Ruth,” said John Roper. “Calm down.”

Tim Mason looked at Maggie.

“She needs to hear this,” he said. “So do you.”

“You don't know me,” Ruth told him. “Don't tell me what I need.”

“You're no different from anyone else,” he replied. “We all need the same thing.”

Ruth was startled by the surge of anger that coursed through her body. It was as if everything she'd swallowed over the past six months— the abuse, the insults, the humiliation—had gathered into a fiery ball that was rising up from her belly, into her throat. She grabbed Maggie by the arm, jerked her to her feet, and yanked her out of the circle. “It's okay, Mom,” Maggie whispered. “It's really okay.” The softness of her daughter's voice threw her for a second, and she wondered if she'd done the right thing. But she had, she knew she had. She took a deep breath and pointed her finger at the coach.

“I'll tell you what I need,” she said. “I need you to stay away from my kid.”

PART TWO Hot Christian Sex

Three-Legged Race

ABBY WAS QUIET IN THE CAR ON SUNDAY MORNING, AND AS USUAL, Tim wasn't sure what to make of her silence. Was she sad about leaving him for another week, or relieved to be getting back to her normal life, the big fancy house she shared with her mother, stepfather, and little brother? Or was she just lost in her own head, worrying about homework, some intrigue with her school friends that didn't concern him at all? “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, a little too quickly “Why?” “I don't know You just seem a little subdued or something.” She insisted she was fine, leaving him to wonder if the sadness was all on his side, if he was simply fishing for a sign that she wanted to stay with him a little longer. He couldn't help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the child she used to be, the little girl whose moods were as obvious as the weather. In the past year, she'd gone all poker-faced on him, turning every interaction into a guessing game. It didn't help that Tim could never quite decide whether this awkwardness was just the normal weirdness of adolescence setting in or something more specific to the two of them.

“Oooh, look,” she said, whipping her head around to follow the path of a sports car that blew past on Pembroke Boulevard. “That's an Audi TT. Those things are awesome.”

Tim didn't reply. Since she'd started going to private school, Abby had developed what he thought was a dishearteningly well-informed enthusiasm for the finer things in life—plasma-screen TVs, Rolexes, designer handbags, iPods, cars that cost more than he made in a year— and he tried, without getting all self-righteous about it, to let her know that he wasn't as impressed as she was, though she didn't seem to care much about his opinion one way or the other.

“Maybe one of these days you can come to Sunday meeting with me,” he ventured. “You know, just give it a try. See what you think.”

“You'll have to talk to Mom.”

They both knew what that meant. The custody agreement gave his ex-wife exclusive control over their daughter's educational and spiritual upbringing, and Allison categorically refused to let Abby set foot in the Tabernacle, which she referred to as “that Nuthouse.” Tim understood all too well where she was coming from, and if he'd been coming from the same place, he would've felt exactly the same way. But that place just happened to be a swamp of vanity and self-delusion, and he prayed that Allison would find her way out of it someday, as unlikely as that seemed.

Not that he was losing any sleep over the state of his ex-wife's soul; she was an adult, responsible for her own life, both in this world and the next. But Abby was still a child, and Tim felt like a coward and a bad father, letting some family court judge stand between his daughter and God. It was crazy: he was allowed to be Abby's soccer coach, but was barred from guiding her in something way more important, the only thing that really mattered.

“So, uh, what are you going to do the rest of the day?”

“Chill out,” she said. “Probably just IM for a while, then go to the mall.”

Tim sighed in a way he instantly regretted, knowing it made him sound like a Goody Two-Shoes, Ned Flanders without the mustache.

“It's the Lord's Day, honey. You shouldn't spend it at the mall.” “We might go to the movies,” she said. “I'm not really sure.” His sense of helplessness—of personal failure—intensified as he turned into Greenwillow Estates, a luxury development full of bloated McMansions, one monstrosity more gaudy and boastful than the next. His disgust at the sheer excess of the houses—what family actually needed six thousand square feet of living space?— was aggravated by a professional grievance. Tim was a mortgage broker, but somehow he never managed to connect with the kinds of clients who bought places like this. He just handled the little guys, people he met through church, mostly—hardworking, two-income families with shaky credit and not much in the way of savings, who could only qualify for high-interest, variable-rate loans that just barely got them inside a rundown ranch or a garrison colonial on a busy street or otherwise marginal neighborhood.

Driving past the vast, oddly immaculate lawns of Country Club Way—it was mid-October, and there was barely a fallen leaf in sight—he fantasized, as he did every week, about pulling a U-turn and heading straight to the Tabernacle. What a pleasure it would be, walking into church with his little girl at his side, the person he loved best in the world, to stand beside her as she listened to God's word, surrounded by the love that filled the humble space, all those joyful voices mingling together in song.

But it wasn't gonna happen. Abby's stepfather was a lawyer, and by all accounts a good one. As polite and friendly as Mitchell always was, Tim had no illusions about the consequences he'd suffer if he violated the custody agreement. Pastor Dennis would have encouraged him to go for it anyway—to stand up for what was right, and trust Jesus to take it from there—but Tim hadn't reached that level of faith yet. There was a special bond between him and Abby—he'd felt it the first time he saw her, just seconds after she'd slipped into the world—and it had survived all sorts of turmoil, those years when he'd disappeared into the wilderness and inflicted all sorts of suffering on the people he loved. He had a lot to make amends for, and couldn't bear the thought of spending a minute less with his daughter than he already did, let alone risking the possibility of being cut off from her altogether.

MITCHELL AND Allison lived in something called a Greek Revival colonial on Running Brook Terrace, a monumental brick house with a portico supported by fluted pillars. Pulling his Saturn into the triple-wide driveway, next to an impossibly lustrous black Lexus SUV, Tim let the engine idle as he turned to his daughter. It was a way of prolonging their time together, as if his custodial rights didn't officially come to an end until he shut off his ignition.

“My little girl,” he said, running his hand over her sleek dark hair, so similar to his own. “You be good, okay?”

She stared back at him, her face blank and patient. After a long moment, she nodded.

“Okay, Dad.”

He felt a fullness in his heart that was almost painful and wished he could think of something to say that would do it justice. But words like that were never there when he needed them.

“I'm gonna miss you, Ab.”

She laughed sweetly—the first happy sound that had come out of her mouth all morning—and patted him on the knee.

“Dude,” she said. “It's only a week.”

ALLISON STOOD in the sunlit, two-story entrance foyer—it featured a glittering chandelier that could be raised and lowered by remote control—looking sweetly disheveled in a gold silk robe that Tim had never seen before, tied just loosely enough for him to get a tantalizing glimpse of the sheer black nightgown underneath. She hugged Abby, then invited him in for the ritual Sunday morning cup of coffee and parental debriefing. He could've begged off, of course, could've told her he was in a rush, had to get ready for church or whatever, but he never did. She was the mother of his child, a woman who'd stood by him for way longer than he deserved before finally throwing in the towel, and the least he could do was give her fifteen minutes a week of his time.

He just wished she would put some clothes on. Allison was a beautiful woman—even at forty, with twenty pounds of post-childbirth weight that looked like it was here to stay—and Tim had to force himself to keep his eyes where they belonged as he trailed her through the dining room to the entrance of the family room, where he paused to say hi to Mitchell and his two-year-old son, Logan, who were playing a wooden ring toss game that looked like it came from a catalogue that only sold toys made of natural materials by the finest Old World craftsmen.

“Hold,” Mitchell called out. He was a baby-faced guy in his late thirties with curly hair and a doughy physique. “It's Senor Tim.”

“Hola to you,” Tim replied. “How's the little guy?”

Mitchell wrapped his thumb and forefinger around Logan's pudgy bicep.

“Strong like bull,” he declared in a ridiculous Russian accent that elicited a hearty chuckle from the boy, who appeared to have been cloned from his father.

Abby peeled off to join her brother and stepfather, while Tim and Allison continued into the breakfast nook. It was possible, he thought, that there was an innocent explanation for the fact that his ex-wife was hardly ever decently dressed when he showed up on Sunday mornings— it was true that she'd never been shy about her body, and had enjoyed lounging around half-naked on weekends ever since he'd known her— but he couldn't help suspecting that she got some satisfaction from reminding him of everything he'd thrown away, all the pleasures and privileges he'd surrendered for the simple, stupid reason that he liked getting high better than he liked being a husband and father.

If that was her strategy, it was working a little too well. Standing in the archway of the eerily spotless dream kitchen—it looked like a movie set, not a place where actual people cooked actual food— watching her pour his coffee, he couldn't help noticing how shamelessly short her robe was, not much longer than a miniskirt, which made him wonder how much shorter than that her nightgown must have been, which led, inevitably, to more specific thoughts about her body, and the many ways she'd shared it with him over the years. Mitchell must have felt like he'd died and gone to heaven, a nerdy intellectual property lawyer living in a house like this with a wife who had a black strawberry tattooed on her ass—she'd gotten it back in the mid-eighties, when it was still a little bit daring—and, unless things had changed, an unusually strong sex drive. The whole deferred-gratification thing had really paid off for the guy, and Tim couldn't help envying him for his discipline and foresight.

THE BREAKFAST island was long and sleek, the countertop a thick slab of polished blue granite with a weirdly deep sink at one end. Sitting across from him, Allison rearranged the lapels of her robe in a gesture of belated modesty, as if it had just occurred to her what she was wearing and who she was with. “So how'd the game go yesterday?” “We won. We're tied for first place in the division.” “Wow.” She sounded impressed, though both of them knew she couldn't have cared less. “How'd Abby do?”

“Great.” He took a sip of coffee, a dark roast that Allison insisted was way better than Starbucks, though Tim could never taste the difference. “I did want to tell you, though—she got into a pretty bad collision near the end of the game. She and this other girl crashed into each other at full speed, and I think she was knocked out for a minute or two.” “Oh my God, did you—”

“Don't worry. Dr. Felder says she's fine, no sign of concussion or anything. He says to just keep an eye on her, but he doesn't anticipate any problems. You can give him a call if you want.”

Tim had expected to be grilled for details—he knew she questioned the soundness of his parental judgments, a holdover from the days when her worries were more than justified—but his explanation seemed to satisfy her. She shook her head with what seemed like genuine empathy.

“That must have been scary for you.”

“You have no idea.”

“I'm glad it was you,” she said, rolling her neck in a lazy circle. She'd recently begun putting blond highlights in her hair, and he liked the way they glinted against the darker gold of her robe. He'd always enjoyed her hair; she used to tease him with it when they were making love, sweeping it across his face and belly like a broom, and she never complained if he pulled it when they were playing rough. “I woulda had a heart attack.”

The conversation flagged for a few seconds, just long enough for him to register the music playing in the background; it was the Dead, a live version of “Cassidy” he'd never heard before. He grunted with surprise.

“What's this, a bootleg?”

“One of those Dick's Picks,” she said.

“Since when do you—?”

“I always liked them,” she said, a bit defensively.

“News to me.”

“I appreciated the music. I just didn't like all the drugs and craziness.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

She looked at him with what felt like real curiosity.

“You still into them?”

“Not so much. I'm trying to put all that behind me.”

“Must be hard.” She smiled sadly, acknowledging the depth of his sacrifice.

“A little easier every day.”

“Good for you.” She paused, letting Jerry finish a jazzy little run, that clean sunny sound no one else could duplicate. “So how's Carrie?”

“Fine.” He didn't like discussing his wife with Allison, though she was more than happy to discuss her husband with him. “Same as always.”

“Well, tell her I said hi.”

Tim nodded, feeling momentarily disoriented. Sitting across from Allison in this gorgeous kitchen, listening to the Grateful Dead on Sunday morning, it was easy to believe that this was his life—their life—a new improved version of the one he'd screwed up so royally. Abby was with them, and Mitchell and Logan and Carrie were just people they knew, and not especially important ones. It was such a convincing sensation that he had to make a conscious effort to remind himself that losing that life, painful as it was, had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. God had a plan for him, and it involved something more important than a big house and a beautiful wife and a happy intact family. He slid off the stool and pressed his palm over the lid of his coffee mug.

“I better be going,” he told her.

MOST OF the time, Tim felt pretty good about his new condo—it was a two-bedroom townhouse with wood floors, central air, a gas fireplace, and Corian countertops—but it always struck him as cramped and dingy after he returned from Greenwillow Estates. Everything was all squashed together—the closet-sized half bath a step away from the front door, the kitchen table wedged between the refrigerator and the dishwasher, forcing you to turn sideways when serving or cleaning up. The furniture, which was perfectly nice, and not cheap by any means, seemed common and nondescript, and even slightly tacky, in a way he couldn't put his finger on.

He had a similar reaction to Carrie, who was sitting on the living room couch, flipping through Parade magazine. With Allison fresh in his mind, she seemed paler and less vivid than usual, vaguely disappointing. He must have stared at her a moment too long, or with a little too much intensity, because she put down the magazine and looked up with a worried smile.

“Everything okay?” rune.

“How's Abby's mom?” For some reason, Carrie insisted on referring to Allison in this way, and Tim could never quite decide if she meant it as a subtle dig or an expression of respect.

“Hard to say I just stopped in for a minute or two.”

She nodded, keeping her gaze trained on his face, as if awaiting instructions. Though she was already dressed for church, he knew she was expecting him to take her by the hand and lead her up to the bedroom, the way he did on most Sunday mornings, taking advantage of this brief interlude—their first free moment of the weekend—between dropping Abby off and heading to church.

But Tim just stood there, hands jammed into his pockets, reminding himself of the promise he'd made to Pastor Dennis after Wednesday Night Bible Study, not to touch his wife until he cleared his head and purified his heart. Because it was deceitful and disrespectful, making love to Carrie after being aroused by Allison, turning one woman into a substitute for another.

“You look upset,” she said. “Can I make you some eggs or something?”

He shook his head, feeling a sudden wave of affection for her. Carrie was a sweet girl and wanted nothing except to make him happy. He stepped toward the couch and extended his hand, as if asking her to dance.

“Pray with me,” he said. “Would you do that?”

TIM AND Carrie had been married for less than a year. Pastor Dennis had introduced them at a church picnic shortly after Tim had found his way to the Tabernacle and been reborn in Christ.

“There's someone I want you to meet,” he said. “I think you'll like her.”

Tim was pleasantly surprised when the Pastor led him over to the condiment table, where a folksingery blond was struggling with a big Costco bag of plastic forks, spoons, and knives that didn't seem to want to open. Unlike most of the single women who worshipped at the Tabernacle, she was young and reasonably cute, with long straight hair and startled-looking blue eyes. In the strong afternoon sunlight, Tim couldn't help noticing that her peasant blouse—a gauzy embroidered garment, the kind of thing pothead girls wore in the late seventies—was translucent enough that you didn't have to strain to see the outline of her bra underneath, which was about as much excitement as you could hope for at a gathering like this. Her breasts were plump and pillowy, not what he normally went for, but he had to make a conscious effort to stop staring at them. He wasn't proud of himself for behaving in such an ungodly way, but he'd been lusting after women since he was twelve, and it was turning out to be a harder habit to break than he'd expected.

Pastor Dennis relieved Carrie of the troublesome bag.

“You're fired,” he told her. “Now get outta here. And take this guy with you, okay?”

Carrie smiled sheepishly at Tim, wiping the back of her hand across her sweaty forehead.

“Hey,” she said. “You're the guitar player.”

“Bass,” he corrected her, momentarily distracted by Pastor Dennis, who was having no more luck with the bag than Carrie had. He was tugging at it with both hands, grimacing fiercely, like a man trying to rip a phone book in two.

“Gosh darn it,” he muttered.

“That's really thick plastic,” Carrie warned.

With one final heroic grunt, the Pastor tore the bag asunder, unleashing a mighty cascade of utensils all over the table, including a few knives that landed in a bowl of bean dip. Tim and Carrie tried to help him with the mess, but he shooed them away.

“I'm okay,” he insisted. “You two go and get acquainted. I bet you have a lot in common.”

THEY SAT in the shade, drinking lukewarm soda, watching the kids tie themselves together in preparation for a three-legged race. The Tabernacle was a relatively new church at that point—it had only been planted for two years, after Pastor Dennis and a handful of disaffected families had split off from the Living Waters Fellowship in Gifford Township, which he accused of being “a namby-pamby, touchy-feely bunch of mealymouthed hypocrites who loved their cable TV better than they loved Jesus Christ”— so there were only about a dozen contestants in the race, ranging in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen.

On the whole, Tim couldn't help thinking, they were an unprepossessing bunch, the boys scrawny and somber, the girls overdressed for such a hot day, visibly uncomfortable, nothing at all like the confident little jockettes Abby played soccer with. They stood at slouchy attention, nodding earnestly as Youth Pastor Eddie explained that sin was like a third leg, a foreign growth that hobbled us on our walk through life. If we could just cut ourselves loose from it, we'd run like the wind, with our Savior at our side.

It was an interesting metaphor, and it didn't seem to spoil anyone's enjoyment. When the first heat began, the little kids leapt forward, managing a few herky-jerky steps before squealing in alarm and toppling onto the grass with their partners. After a few seconds of hilarity, they untangled themselves, got up, and started over, dragging that extra limb around as best they could.

“You've had such an interesting life,” Carrie told him. “I haven't done hardly anything.”

As far as he could tell, she wasn't exaggerating. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, raised in a strict evangelical home, who hadn't gone to college or even lived on her own. She rarely dated, had no close friends outside of church, and spent her days running the office of a Christian insurance agent who was a friend of the family The way she described it, the only act of defiance she'd ever committed was to follow Pastor Dennis to the Tabernacle, against the wishes of her parents, who'd stayed behind at Living Waters. It made sense that she'd be intrigued by Tim's checkered past, especially the rock bands he'd played in when he was her age.

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