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she flipped a burger on the
    grill. “I don’t think three days after giving birth is enough time for
    Tina to come back, do you?”
    Jackie chuckled at the mention of her work friend who had
    served as their setter last year. “Are you kidding me? I talked to her
    on the phone yesterday. She’s so in love with her son, we may never
    see her again. You sure you don’t want to play, Di? We could use
    you.”
    Alex cringed, but hid it well by pretending to fuss with a
    burger.
    Diane turned her sunglassed face toward Jackie as she sat on
    the lounge, her feet in Nikki’s lap. “Nah. I don’t think so.”
    Kinsey wandered over to them, sniffing. Diane blatantly
    pushed him away and he moved on to Nikki, who scratched his
    head sweetly. “You’d be a great setter, honey,” she said to Diane,
    smiling gently.
    “Yeah, I know I would. Volleyball’s just not my thing; it never
    has been. They wanted me to play in school, too, but I turned them
    down. It’s kind of boring.”
    Alex rolled her eyes. Yes, I can see how a game where you
    don’t physically knock down your opponent would be boring for
    you, she thought—and actually managed to keep herself from mut-
    tering it out loud. She shot Jackie a look. Jackie’s return expression
    told her to keep quiet, for Nikki’s sake.
    She flipped another burger and tightly clenched her teeth.
    26 Georgia Beers

    * * *
    Jennifer was having a hard time explaining to herself why she
    felt such a pang in her stomach when she realized Alex was having
    some sort of party. After all, she’d only known the woman for a
    very short time, so it wasn’t like she expected to be invited. After a
    long while of listening to the laughing and joking coming from the
    deck as she worked on her plants, she decided she was simply envi-
    ous of the good time they were having.
    She thought about the get-togethers that she and Eric had
    thrown in the past; there weren’t very many, aside from the house-
    warming party they’d thrown when they’d moved into their house in
    Pittsford. It had included some of their school friends and had been
    a good time, but they had drifted from that group since. Eric’s job
    required long hours and constant contact with the same group of
    people in his office, so Jennifer thought it might be good to get to
    know some of them on a more personal level. She decided to have a
    sort of happy hour at their house, telling Eric to invite his col-
    leagues from the office and their spouses to drop by after work one
    Friday night. It had turned out to be one of the most boring affairs
    she’d ever been a part of. The people were wooden to say the least,
    talking only of money and their clients. The group was almost
    unbelievably stereotypical. If she did her best to picture a room full
    of snooty, rich people, she invariably came up with the exact group
    that had occupied her home that night. It was a chillingly sterile
    party. When the last guest had departed, she and Eric had stood in
    the foyer, looking at each other in disbelief.
    “Wow,” he’d said, eyes wide. “That was…frightening.”
    “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought so,” she’d
    responded. “You work all day long with them?”
    He nodded. “Thus, the term ‘frightening.’ Let’s not do that
    again, okay?”
    “You’ve got yourself a deal, babe.”
    There were still occasions where they had to socialize with
    Eric’s colleagues, but they hadn’t invited any of them over since
    that night.
    The party going on next door was obviously not like that at all,
    and that’s where the pang of envy came from. They were laughing.
    They laughed a lot. Jennifer managed to keep herself from glancing
    often in their direction, but she had no trouble picking Alex’s rum-
    bling chuckle out of the air; hers seemed to carry further than the
    rest and was contagious. More than once, she caught herself smiling
    at the sound of it.
    Finding it difficult to look in from the outside as it were,