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became aware of a man standing in front of their table. He was wildly handsome in a Ricky Martin way, wearing a satin shirt unbuttoned for full exposure of his own fine gold chains, and he was young. They were around twenty-six. He was probably twenty-one. His skin was like honey, his lips full, his dark eyes deep with sexual promise.
    He swept his thick-ebony-lashed eyes across the three of them. He said,
“¡Hola!”
    The three women stopped laughing. For a long moment they just stared, lips clinging to their margarita glasses.
    Vanessa, who spoke some Spanish, replied,
“¡Hola!”
    At this, the Ricky Martin clone leaned toward them, and putting his hands on the table, unrolled a series of silken Spanish words toward them with such speed not even Vanessa could understand him.
    “¿Perdón?”
Vanessa asked.
    And then the spell was broken by the arrival of their waiter, not nearly as handsome as Ricky Martin. In rapid-fire Spanish, with many gestures, the waiter made it clear that the young man was bothering the ladies and should leave them alone
pronto
.
    Ricky Martin shrugged sadly, and walked away, turning only to say,
“Las tres enchiladas.”
    “What?” Maud demanded of Vanessa. “What did he say?”
    “It sounded like he called us enchiladas,” Vanessa told her.
    “Yeah,” Carley agreed. “I heard that, too.
Las tres enchiladas
. Why would he call us enchiladas?”
    “Well, obviously, he
didn’t
call us enchiladas,” Maud said. “He must have said something that
sounded
like enchiladas.”
    Carley suggested hopefully, “Maybe in Spanish
enchilada
is a compliment. Like in French they call someone
ma petite choufleur.
”
    “I don’t think so,” Vanessa dryly disagreed.
    “Well, I’m going to buy a Spanish dictionary!” Maud decided.“I’m going to go through every word that sounds like enchilada until I find one that he might have meant.”
    “Girl,” Carley teased, “you are desperate for a compliment.”
    After that night, they called themselves Las Tres Enchiladas. When people asked them why, they said it was too complicated to explain, which made people like Beth Boxer, the gossip of their married group, suspect all sorts of erotic misbehavior. That made it all the sweeter. Really, the word sparked a touchstone in their spirits, reminding them vividly, for just a moment, of that evening of freedom and lighthearted camaraderie. It brought back the jangling jewelry, the silken non-mommy clothes, the salty margaritas, and the hooded-eyed young man.
    It was good for them to have a tight little clique in those days because shortly after that night, Maud’s husband John left her for a much younger woman. He moved to California, never called his sons, and was systematically late with child support checks.
    Maud struggled along financially, writing children’s books. She illustrated her books, too; she was very talented. Her
Flip and Bob
books, about two harbor seals (brothers, like Maud’s sons) and their adventures in the waters around Nantucket, became popular, bringing in the income Maud truly needed.
    Maud had wanted daughters. She’d dreamed of having three little girls she could dress in identical white dresses with blue sashes. Instead, she had her two boisterous, energetic, noisy boys, named Spenser and Percy by her English-teacher ex-husband. After John left her, Maud often called Carley and Vanessa in a panic; her two sons were accident-prone, or perhaps, Carley thought, they were just normal. Carley drove Maud and the boys to the emergency room when Spenser fell out of a tree and broke his arm. When Percy stuck his soggy chewing gum in his older brother’s hair Vanessa drove over to help Maud cut it out because Maud couldn’t get Spenser to calm down and sit still.
    And when Carley’s husband died, Maud and Vanessa had been her rock, her parachute, her safety net, her emotional 911. Carley didn’t know how she’d have survived without them.
    Tomorrow morning Vanessa was