A Stolen Summer. Allegra Huston

for my professional advice. Hell, make it fifteen. I’m worth it.”

      “Might only be a cup of coffee.”

      “Non-fat triple macchiato with sugar-free vanilla syrup and whipped cream and slivered almonds or some shit on top. Those things add up.”

      “Deal.”

      Deborah reaches over to clink Eve’s glass. “Five hunting weekends in a row,” she says. “Lucky me.”

      Even though it’s summer, and unpleasant weather for junk-shop hunting. Eve should be working in her own garden on weekends—it’s an advertisement for her work, after all—but the numbing fog has killed the enthusiasm she once had for making it beautiful.

      “So tell me,” Deborah asks with sly sarcasm, “how’s that animal of a husband of yours?” Deborah laughed herself hoarse when Eve told her about Larry’s discovery of his wolf spirit. She had kept it quiet for months, but one night the chardonnay got the better of her discretion.

      “Ow-ow-ow-ow-oooooo!” Deborah howled up at a particularly bright globe chandelier. Her favorite part of the story was that Larry had found his inner wolf not in a dehydrated delirium in a Navajo sweat-lodge, or on top of a wind-blasted peak in South Dakota with blood streaming down his chest, but in a boutique bed and breakfast in New Hampshire.

      Eve couldn’t help laughing too, though she felt disloyal. Deborah and Larry never liked each other. He found her crass, and her swearing offended him. Eve’s other friends are decorous and safe, but Eve discovered to her surprise, after meeting Deborah over the years at PTA bake sales, school plays, and graduations, that hanging out with her was a relief from saying what she ought to say and thinking what she ought to think. Having Deborah for a friend is rather like having a pet tiger: you’re never quite sure when and where she will pounce. She can be exhausting sometimes, because it’s hard to have total confidence that the prey she’s stalking isn’t you.

      She’s asking about Larry now because her instincts have been pricked by Eve’s abandonment of her garden. She smells blood.

      “He’s in Arizona,” Eve says. “He’s supposed to get home today.”

      “Supposed?” Deborah repeats. “You mean you don’t know?”

      “Actually, he was supposed to get home last night. I don’t think he did.”

      Eve slept the sleep of the dead—not because she was sated from sex, but because she was emotionally exhausted by the assaults of the truth. When she woke, she listened for the usual bathroom noises, the blender, the garage door. Had he already come and gone? She might not have known, comatose as she was. Should she be worried? The distance he’s forced between them in the past year has thinned her care for him.

      “He didn’t call?”

      “No.”

      “Dick.”

      Coming to see Deborah this evening is Eve’s way of asserting that everything is fine. But she came for a reality check, too. Because with Deborah, that’s what you get.

      “Honey, he’s left you. And he’s too much of a coward to tell you to your face.” Deborah snorts. “Inner wolf, my ass. All that man found is his inner pussy.”