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they usually ended up at the Crab to undo all their good work with some artery-clogging fried seafood.
    You wouldn’t find Dorie exercising in front of the whole world. Anyway, she ran around enough working at the restaurant. Forty years of it. Sore feet and cheap tippers, hurricanes and blizzards, broken air conditioners and broken furnace. Broken hearts . . .
    Sometimes she wondered why she kept at it. But not often. Dorie wasn’t given to introspection all that much. She was of the school that too much thinking led to impotence. And life had proved her right.
    She wasn’t what you’d call impetuous, either. Though she’d kind of jumped to a decision about this funeral thing. Now she was afraid she might have a situation on her hands.
    Dorie walked over to the railing, looked at the steps to the beach, just a sliver of sand between the pier and the river. It was open to the public nowadays. So much fighting and carrying-onto take that beach away from the hotel. But they did, and Whisper Beach became just some more sand in the town’s public beach. And the dumbest part was nobody even used it. It was a pretty stretch of sand, protected by dunes and a seawall holding the river out. But no matter how crowded the big beach got, it hardly ever spilled over to Whisper Beach. And that’s how the locals liked it.
    It might be public, but something unspoken said, private keep out.
    Now the hotel had been sold, which Dorie guessed was a good thing, since it hadn’t been rebuilt after Sandy. Which was stupid if you asked her. It was beachfront property if you didn’t count Ocean Avenue that ran between it and the boardwalk.
    Maybe they’d build another more modern hotel and her business would boom again. Or they might put up fancy condos with a four-star restaurant that charged four times as much as she did and didn’t cook half as well.
    Well, it was what it was, and out of her hands. She would adapt. She always did.

    V AN AND S UZE sat in Dorie’s parlor, the funeral food spread out on the coffee table and a bottle of cabernet in the center. They’d changed into more comfortable clothes as soon as they’d arrived.
    Suze was wearing gauze harem pants and a tank top. Her naturally blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail leaving a fringe of fuzz around her face. It made her look young and carefree, not like a professor hoping for tenure and waiting for a grant that would support her research in order to get it.
    Van always kept her hair short. It was more efficient and made her look more professional. And the cut, one that cost a fortune,was precise and sleek. Like her. Though Van had to admit that as she sat on the chintz-covered couch, watching Suze slumped comfortably in the old chair and drinking wine out of a jelly jar, she felt a little overdressed in her pressed capris and silk tee.
    Well, they would have looked great at the bar in the hotel. Which reminded her. She reached for her phone, keyed in the numbers to the hotel, and postponed her reservation.
    She hung up to see a grinning Suze, who handed her a glass, spilling a few drops on the coffee table as she did.
    Van took the glass and wiped up the drops with the efficiency that had made her successful.
    â€œIt’s like nothing changed,” Suze said, oblivious to the spill and cleanup. “The same pastel walls. Same white gauze curtains. This same saggy chair.”
    â€œDon’t forget the new air-conditioning,” Van said. It was the first thing she’d noticed when they’d entered. Well, the first thing after Harold.
    â€œThank heavens for that. I wasn’t relishing the idea of sleeping au naturel and sweating under an open window. And she still has those god-awful shades on the windows.”
    â€œWhat shades? I don’t recall seeing any in my room.”
    â€œBecause yours isn’t on the side of the house with the fire escape. Don’t you remember? She put them up after