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dirt-edged Band-Aid on her elbow, the smel of syrup and bacon, the pol eny, green-grass haze in the humid air. I can remember, even then, the feeling of my life balanced on top of a triangle—a fulcrum, it was cal ed; my father had told me that—getting ready to tilt one way or the other.
    Across the street, the beautiful woman raised her hand. Her silver bracelets clinked as they slid down her arm. I lifted my arm to wave back as Valerie looked unhappily over her shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “can I come in? She probably wants to start unpacking.”
    She yawned enormously. “We drove…” She paused, yawning again. “…al night.” She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder.
    “Actual y, not quite al night. We stopped at a rest stop. We camped out in the car. Did you ever do that?”
    I shook my head. When my family went on car trips, we set out armed with an AAA TripTik and reservations at Days Inns along the way. My mother would pack picnic lunches: turkey sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, and a thermos ful of milk.
    “You can camp outside,” Valerie said. “In your backyard. I’l show you how to make a tent.
    Al you need is an old sheet.” I nodded. I could picture it: a crisp white sheet forming a perfect triangle, Valerie and I, our faces lit by flashlights, side by side beneath it. Valerie lifted her head and sniffed. “Are you having breakfast?”
    “Are you hungry?” I asked.
    Her stomach growled before she could say anything. I swung the door open wide and made a little bow, a sweeping gesture with my arm, something I’d probably seen on TV.
    “Come in,” I said, and she did.
    SIX
    In the kitchen, the kettle whistled. I turned the flame down and studied my old friend. Underneath her coat she wore a tight red dress that clung to her chest and hips and dipped low in the back. There was a belt of wide gold links around her waist and, on her feet, high-heeled pumps with pointed toes. Diamonds winked at her earlobes and on her right hand, and she carried a capacious handbag made of soft red leather over one shoulder. “Are you alone?”
    she asked. No, I’ve got a bunch of Chippendale
    dancers back in the bedroom! Wearing
    nothing but baby oil and teeny little togas!
    “Yes, Valerie. I’m alone. What do you want?”
    I asked in a not entirely friendly tone of voice.
    “I can’t believe you’re stil here,” she said, surveying the kitchen, which was much improved since she’d been there last. I’d taken up the linoleum and put in glazed terra-cotta tiles. I’d ripped out the mirrored backsplash, a living shrine to the 1970s, and banished the harvest-gold Formica and avocado-green appliances, replacing them with softer, richer shades: cream and butter and rich rusty red on the wal s. A farmhouse sink with a gorgeously curved, ruinously expensive faucet sat beneath the window that looked out at the backyard.
    There was a round oak table, crisp cream-colored curtains framing the new windows, cabinets that I’d painted myself…but the liquor, that col ection of dusty bottles of Chivas and Ron-rico rum, some of them given to me as gifts and some dating from my parents’
    marriage, was stil in the same place, in the cabinet over the refrigerator.
    Val stood on her tiptoes and extracted a bottle of vodka. She rummaged in the freezer and came up with a handful of ice.
    “Drink?” she asked. I shook my head. She dumped the ice and a slug of vodka into a juice glass and gulped. Then she hoisted herself onto the counter next to the sink
    —her old familiar perch, the place I’d seen her a hundred, maybe a thousand times, with her long legs swinging, dirty white socks on her feet, and usual y a scrape or a BandAid or two decorating each knee. “Where are Ron and Nancy?” I could hear the strain in her voice as she tried for her old familiar tone, that life’s-a-lark buoyancy with which she’d formerly addressed, or discussed, my parents (how amused she’d been to learn that they