“I don’t?”

“Not really,” Julia said. They’d reached the open-air ice cream shop. It was a concrete block affair, painted with circus-bright red-and-yellow stripes. A dozen people stood in line in front of them, waiting to order, and the picnic tables, located in the shade of the shop’s overhang, were full. Rock music blared from speakers mounted on wooden columns. Ellis and Julia crowded close together, seeking refuge from the searing ninety-plus heat.

The song was Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Without thinking, they started swaying their upper bodies to the music.

“What’s this song remind you of?” Julia asked, reading the chalkboard menu.

“Me?” Beneath two days’ tan, Ellis blushed.

“I knew it!” Julia cackled. “Ellis and Mikey Cavanaugh, gettin’ jiggy at my fifteenth-birthday party.”

“Would you please shut up?” Ellis said. “People can hear you.”

“So what?” Julia twirled around, juking right and left, humming the song that had been their junior high anthem. “Oh, you were so hot for Mikey Cavanaugh back then. My mother saw you making out with him behind the garage, you know. She was gonna call your mama and tell her, but Daddy told her to mind her own business. Oooh, Ellis, you were a bad little girl back in the day.”

“Shut up,” Ellis said, going pink with the delicious memory of kissing the cutest boy at the party.

“Take your order?” The girl behind the counter was Hispanic, and she wore a pained expression and a ridiculous paper cap made to look like an ice cream cone. “Ma’am?” she said loudly, to the oblivious Julia.

Ellis jostled Julia’s arm. “Come on. It’s your turn.”

“Oh. Yeah. Let me see. All right. Do you have gelato?”

“Julia! This is Nags Head, not Rome,” Ellis said. “It’s ice cream, all right?” She leaned into the counter. “She’ll have a single scoop of Rocky Road in a cup, and I’ll have a single coffee chocolate chip in a sugar cone. And two large cups of ice water, please.”

Before Julia could stop her, Ellis handed over a five-dollar bill, and plunked the change in a tip jar displayed prominently on the counter.

By mutual agreement, they perched at the end of a picnic bench at a table where a young mother busily spooned ice cream into her sandy toddler’s wailing mouth.

“I can’t believe you remembered about the Rocky Road, and the cup, no cone, after all these years,” Julia said, dipping the tiny plastic spoon into the ice cream.

“And I can’t believe you still won’t let me live Mikey Cavanaugh down—twenty years later,” Ellis said. “Did your mother really see us together, or are you just saying that to torture me?”

“She really did!” Julia nodded vigorously. “You know, until the day she died, she still thought you were a bad influence on me.”

“Me?” Ellis hooted. “I was the voice of reason. The sane one. If it weren’t for me, you would have gone to jail or hell, long ago.”

“I know,” Julia said. “Ellis Sullivan, designated driver for life. Mama always thought I was the angel and you were the devil, and I wasn’t going to tell her any different. And you know, when you got out of college and got engaged, Mama told me she was glad, because you were finally going to settle down with that nice boy. She didn’t even really mind that he was Jewish, and a Yankee.”

Ellis sighed. “Bless her heart, your mama never did have a clue.”

“You ever hear from him?” Julia asked, tilting her head. The three of them, Julia, Dorie, and Ellis, had all pledged, long ago, to never again speak the name of Ellis’s ex-husband. “He’s dead to us,” Dorie had proclaimed at the end of the three-month-long marriage.

And his name, which was Ben Greene, and the wedding and marriage, as far as her friends knew, seemed to have miraculously faded from Ellis’s memory. It was such an un-Ellis-like thing to have happened that she could almost persuade herself that it hadn’t. Almost.

“I haven’t heard from him in years,” Ellis said, which was technically true. “Last I heard, he’d gotten remarried. I think they have a baby.”

Through the magic of Google, where she’d found Greene Acres, his second wife’s chatty blog, Ellis knew exactly where Ben was living (Winnetka, Illinois), what he was doing (running his family’s furniture-import business), and the name of his new wife (Sherry). She knew they had two shelties (Lulu and Lucky) and a two-year-old son named Sam (after Ben’s favorite uncle).

And she would have died if anybody, especially Ben, knew just how often she read Greene Acres.

“Well, thank God for small favors,” Julia said vehemently. “He’s somebody else’s problem and not yours. Sweet Jesus! Can you imagine having a baby with ears like his? You’d have to put a sidecar on the baby buggy just to accommodate ’em.”

On the contrary, Ellis had seen photos of little Sam, and she thought he was the most adorable toddler she’d ever laid eyes on. He had huge, soulful blue eyes, a thick fringe of pale hair, and a perfect, cupid-bow’s mouth, which he must have gotten from his mother, because everybody in Ben’s family had nearly nonexistent upper lips.

“Ellis?” Julia was looking at her strangely.

“His ears weren’t that big,” Ellis said. “You just never liked him from the get-go.”

“And was I wrong? Did you have to file papers on him even before you’d finished writing the thank-you notes for the wedding presents?”

“You were right,” Ellis said, wadding up her paper napkin and crushing it on top of her unfinished ice cream cone. She tossed both, underhand, into the metal trash basket, and took a long drink of ice water. “I hated you for it at the time, but you were oh, so right.”

Everybody but Ellis had known just how wrong Ben was for her. And the day Ben realized it too, just three months into the marriage, he’d calmly, coldly announced, at dinner, two days before her birthday, that the whole thing had been a regrettable mistake. That was the exact word he’d used, too. Regrettable. There’d been no fight, no ugly scene, just Ben, in his pale-yellow golf shirt, pushing back from the table, setting his fork at the edge of his dinner plate, saying, his eyes serious but dry, “I’m sorry, Ellis, but we both know this will never work.”

Pressed by his tearful—well, hysterical, really—bride, Ben had finally uttered the words that had stilled the tears and broken Ellis’s heart for good. “I’m just not in love with you. I thought I was, I wanted to be, but I’m not.”

Before the night was out, Ben had packed his clothes, his books, his CDs, and moved out of their apartment. And before Ellis could even really comprehend what was happening, the divorce was final and the marriage was almost, but not completely, forgotten.

Nobody but Ellis knew how she still grieved for what was gone. Her marriage was the first thing she’d ever really failed at. Afterwards, she’d packed away all the wedding china, silver, and crystal, which she could no longer bear to look at, and simply thrown all her energy and talent into her job, winning promotions, rave job evaluations, and raises. But the loneliness never subsided. She missed living with a man, having somebody to eat dinner with and buy shirts for. She missed having somebody waiting at the airport baggage claim when she came home from a business trip, and she missed slow, delicious Saturday morning lovemaking. Oh God, had it really been ten years since she’d had sex? More. Eleven and a half years, if you didn’t count some heavy petting with a man she had dated in the year immediately following her divorce, when she’d been desperate to prove to herself just how over Ben she was.

Julia stood up abruptly. “Come on, we better get back to Dorie. I don’t want to have to be giving her oatmeal baths like we did that summer at Myrtle Beach.”

Ellis grimaced. “What were we thinking, slathering ourselves with that nasty baby oil and iodine mess? It’s a wonder we don’t all have skin cancer. ”