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opened it. It said,
Is Bianca really playing tennis tonight?
    Zoë sighed.
No
, she wrote underneath it.
Bianca is a figment of my imagination. I lost my grip on reality. Sorry.
    She slid it back to him and then moments later, the paper flipped back over her shoulder into her lap again.
    Make me a happy man and tell me Nick is a figment, too.
    She scowled at the paper and wrote,
Nick is alive and well and divorced from me, thank God, but I do not do married men, so just go hit the couch with Jeanette and her great legs.
    She tossed the paper over her shoulder into the vicinity of his lap and tried to concentrate on her boss, who was still talking but now looking at her oddly.
    After a moment, the paper landed back in her lap again, and she briefly thought of turning around and stuffing it between his teeth, but she unfolded it and read it instead.
    I can’t even remember this woman’s name, and you still think I’m married to her? The only thing about her that’s real is her legs, and they’re yours. So here’s the deal. You are invited back to my room at the Great Southern for pizza and videos. I’ll send the concierge out for a hammock. What do you say?
    Zoë thought about it for approximately ten seconds, her career and those blond children running laps in her brain.
Don’t be stupid
, she thought and then realized she didn’t know which answer was stupid.
    “Is there a problem, Zoë?” her boss said.
    She turned and looked at Ben. He smiled at her and there was warmth and light in his face, and she thought of how he’d talked about Harold and Annabelle, especially Annabelle, and she thought about the hammock, and suddenly Little League didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Maybe she could coach, she’d been great at softball …
    “Zoë?” her boss said.
    “Yes, there’s a problem,” Zoë said, not taking her eyes off Ben. “Harold is absolutely out of the question.”
    “As long as he plays Little League, I don’t care what his name is,” Ben said.
    “We’ll discuss it.” Zoë turned back to her boss. “No. There are no problems. In fact, I think Ben and I can take it from here.”
    Then she wrote,
Yes
, on the paper and tossed it back over her shoulder to the father of her future children.

    I’ve never been sure about this story as a story. It’s a little too predictable, a little too neat. So I tell myself there were some fights and breakups along the way, that Zoë and Ben had to really work to get to commitment, but the truth is, for some people, it’s like this. So I’m standing by this version: They all lived happily ever after. Even later when their daughter Jeannie gets head lice at school.

Necessary Skills

    This story came out of a writing exercise in Michelle Herman’s class. As I remember (foggy memory many years later), Michelle had us do character sketches of a minor character from a story we were working on. Then she had us swap with somebody else in the class and the exercise was to write a scene between the two characters, merging two story worlds. I’d written about Barbara, the Bank Slut (the first drafts of this story were called “The Bank Slut’s Story”), and my partner, whose name I have shamefully forgotten, had written about Randy, who drove a Peachstate Cable truck down south. That meant I had to get Ohio Barbara down south somehow since it didn’t seem right to drag Randy up north, and while I was trying to figure out how Barbara had gotten herself to Georgia, a much better understanding of a character I hadn’t liked much emerged. I don’t think you have to like all your characters, but I do think you have to have some sympathy for them and a lot of understanding of why they do the things they do. And this story, which is so interior that it runs close to reverting to character sketch again, told me everything I needed to connect to Barbara.

    B arbara knew she’d made a mistake when Matthew couldn’t change the tire.
    She stood on the edge of the hot