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Lutheran from Ohio with straight-ahead morals and a great pair of legs!” To this Sherry nodded, red hair perfectly curled, her arm clenched around the developer’s like a vice. B. realized then with an abrupt but diffuse kind of terror that it wasn’t just their outfits that were similar, it was the way the developer looked at them. With the same missing part of his gaze. A shudder went through her and she dropped her highball. Sherry stooped to the shards and the developer went for a broom, and B. excused herself and slipped out of the party.
    She could try to daydream about Daughtry. She felt the carsickness slightly less with him, with his endless chattering, his graceless ways. Her initial, un-thought-out belief was that he could take her away somehow. She didn’t know what she meant by away any more than she’d known what she meant by help . But the workingman calluses on Daughtry’s hands, their roughness when he guided her by the back of her neck into his coupe, made her feel he existed in a real, visceral way the anemic-looking developers could not. And so she had tried to overlook their differences, to convince herself they were an asset. For the Carmel trip, she’d bought a merry widow—an optimistic, pale pink lace in the corseted body, rosettes at the top of its garters. She’d bought a new dress and matching heels at I. Magnin. On the way home from Carmel Daughtry said, “We had a good time, didn’t we, baby? We saw the ocean, right? And I’ll get you to like abalone one day. I’ll get you to like me.” Then he laughed too loudly, his face tensed. He was a good person underneath the slicked hair and the gauche talk, B. thought. Probably better than she.
    She watched a beer can float by on the river. A faintly sulfurous scent wafted up from the water. She got up and made her way back to the car.
    Hungry, she drove back to the town with the burger stand. It was a small shack, rusted-metal outdoor seats and a window counter. A collarless cat bolted around the corner as B. appro ached. Through the window she ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke from a thin teenage boy. She did not have enough money in her purse, so she excused herself to the dingy bathroom around back and took one of the fifties from her bra strap. But when she returned the teenage boy stared at the bill on the counter. “We don’t have enough change for that, ma’am.” The boy and B. both flushed. She slipped the stolen bill back into her purse. When she turned to leave, the teenager called her back and said under his breath he’d put it on the house.
    There was a group of men sitting a few seats down. They were not much older than she, perhaps in their mid-thirties, with cloudy forearm tattoos, angular and leathered skin from too much sun. They talked and laughed tersely. B. sat down at one of the outdoor tables and picked up a left-behind newspaper to appear occupied. She flipped to a picture of the first lady and the president. B. had always preferred Lady Bird to Jackie, who was too aloof and enigmatic. Lady Bird with her dull matching suits and hair correctly curled would understand B.’s growing concern about the young women with unstyled hair. She would be equally dismayed at the unmatched clothes, the sitting in parks and dancing to guitars and smoking marijuana, the absence of stockings. And Lady Bird, she knew, would be most disturbed by the hazy blitheness in their eyes, as if beatitude came from disarray, as if one could go through life with nothing else expected of them.
    B. sensed the men watching her in between their laconic exchanges.
    Yes, she felt someone like Lady Bird ought to take the situation of the unstockinged young women in hand. As a national epidemic, a degenerative trend.
    B. was gazing on the photo, lost in these thoughts, when one of the men was suddenly next to her.
    â€œYou lost, miss?”
    â€œNo.” She searched the pick-up window