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tactfully stays in the other room. I didn’t want to carry on a conversation with Joe while Jeff was digging in the refrigerator for a bedtime snack or otherwise standing around with his ears hanging out. I told Joe as much.
    “So you and Nettie took the kid in,” he said.
    “Aunt Nettie’s too kindhearted not to. But there wasn’t really anything else to do.”
    “You could send him to a motel.”
    “I suppose my credit card would stand it, but Jeff claims he left college because he wants to be on his own. Lending him money doesn’t seem like a good thing to do, and neither does paying his rent. And I could hardly send him to the homeless shelter.”
    “You could send him to jail.”
    “No, I couldn’t, Joe. That’s not a realistic opinion. I mean option.”
    “Maybe not. But—listen, how about if he comes over here?”
    “No! You don’t have any room for him.” Joe was living in one room at the boatyard. He had a rollaway bed, a hot plate, and a microwave.
    “I’ve got an air mattress and a sleeping bag. I don’t like him alone in the house with you and Nettie.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “I’m not. The kid definitely tried to break into the house this morning. That’s a criminal act. You admit you don’t know him too well. How long has it been since you saw him?”
    “A couple of years.”
    “Have you heard anything about him in the meantime? Like, was he president of his Sunday-school class?”
    “No, I haven’t heard much about him since Rich and I divorced, and I doubt he’s president of his Sunday-school class, since I never heard of either of his parents taking him to church. But I’m not afraid to have him in the house.”
    “Well, put a chair under your doorknob.”
    The water stopped then, and Joe and I hung up on that slightly antagonistic note. It seemed that a lot of our conversations had been ending that way lately.
    I guess I was getting tired of sitting home by the telephone. Joe kept telling me he wanted us to start dating, but we didn’t seem to be getting close to that goal.
    Joe was a Warner Pier native; his mother ran an insurance agency across the street from TenHuis Chocolade. I’d first known him—or known of him—twelve years earlier, when Joe was chief lifeguard at Warner Pier’s Crescent Beach, and I was one of the gang of teenaged girls who stood around and admired his shoulders. Joe had been a high school hotshot—allstate wrestler, state debate champion, straight-A student, senior class president. He got a scholarship to the University of Michigan and did well there and in law school. Aunt Nettie says his mother glowed every time his name was mentioned.
    But after law school Joe surprised his mother by going to work for a Legal Aid–type operation instead of the big firm she’d pictured. His mom wasn’t as excited about that.
    Then Joe met Clementine Ripley. The Clementine Ripley. One of the nation’s top defense attorneys, the one the movie stars and big financiers called before they called the cops.
    Ms. Ripley went to Detroit to defend one of Joe’s clients pro bono. Before the trial was over, he’d fallen for her in a major way, and she had found him a pleasant diversion. Joe convinced her that they should get married, even though she was more than fifteen years older than he was.
    Warner Pier says that it was doomed from the start, and Joe says he was naïve—only he uses the word “stupid.” He also might not have expected the attention the marriage drew from the tabloid press: TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY WEDS TOYBOY LOVER IN MAY–DECEMBER ROMANCE.
    That was followed by TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY BUILDS SHOWPLACE HOME IN TOYBOY HUSBAND’S HOMETOWN. Next, TOYBOY HUSBAND OF TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY QUITS LAW CAREER, DENIES PLAN TO BECOME HOUSE HUSBAND. Finally, TOP WOMAN DEFENSE ATTORNEY SPLITS WITH TOYBOY HUSBAND. AGE NOT FACTOR, BOTH CLAIM, with a subhead, “Ex now repairing boats.”
    Joe’s version is that Clementine Ripley’s