The Scarlet Letter Society. Mary T. McCarthy

that?” asked Lisa, fishing her journal out of her purse.

      Maggie replied, “It’s a website where this auburn haired chick does instructional videos on how to give the perfect blowjob. It’s not porny or tacky. It’s quite helpful!”

      Eva added, “You have to admit it is kind of hilarious that there is just this, like, DICK that appears from the left side of the screen. You never ever even see the guy.”

      “He must be a pretty happy guy,” said Lisa.

      “Yeah, nice work if you can get it, huh?” said Maggie.

      Eva took a sip of her coffee. “So what’s the latest in your ever-active love life, Mags?”

      “Divorce number two will be final pretty soon. Everything is going fine with Ted, but I actually have a new friend now, too.”

      “Holy Mary Magdelene loving Jesus!” declared Eva. “Can you ever just be shagging one person, Margaret Hanson?”

      “Well if that ain’t the tramp kettle calling the slut pot black, I don’t know what is,” snorted Maggie as a grin spread across her face, now lined with smile lines at 47. She crossed her vintage cowboy boots and adjusted her brown corduroy skirt.

      “It so happens,” announced Maggie, “that I’m sort of cheating on my lover with a very adorable professional in town.”

      “A professional what?” laughed Eva with an eye roll. “So what’s this one’s name?”

      “Well, smarty pants,” said Maggie, “I’ll have to tell you all about it later.”

      As the women left the shop, Zarina raised the store’s front window shade and flipped the sign to “open.” Then she texted her boyfriend, Stanley. He loved to come over and hear all about the morning meeting, especially since it always made her a little horny for some reason. Flying estrogen? She entered two words into her battered iPhone 3: “Booty. Call.”

      When Maggie asked if Zarina could have two copies of The Scarlet Letter (Eva read on a Kindle app), she was happy to accommodate her favorite customers, and appreciated them supporting the store. She found three gently used copies at a great price, ordering the extra copy for herself. Ha! I will be in their book club and they won’t even know it, she thought, laughing to herself.

      Zarina smiled at Stanley as he entered the shop a short time later.

      “Yes, I’m here for one Booty Latte, extra cream, please,” he smiled.

      “Coming right up,” said Zarina, winking at him.

      I love how much fun we have together, thought Zarina as she made his coffee, and how he makes me laugh.

      Stanley interrupted her coffee making by grabbing her from behind and planting heated kisses on her neck. She turned, put down the cup, and pulled him by the belt hook of his jeans into the small bathroom. She locked the door. Just the necessary amounts of clothes peeled away as he scooped her up onto the bathroom sink. Nothing like forbidden sex, thought Zarina, smiling at the possibility of a customer coming into the store at any time.

      Ten minutes later, Stanley and Zarina were sitting on the couch next to each other, playing Words with Friends together on their phones.

      Stanley looked at Zarina.

      “Thanks for being my old person,” he said, and gave that silly, crooked grin that simply undid her.

      When Stanley came into her shop for coffee one day, they just sort of clicked: finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at stupid things no one else would think were funny. Stanley joked that they were kind of like… old people who would play on a Scrabble board in their retirement community in the same way they played WWF on iPhones. It’s the same game, seriously, he’d said.

      “I love being old people with you,” she said.

      Love is awesome, thought Zarina. Except when it sucks. She listened to the ladies at the SLS club each month, and they talk about doomed love and who’s having sex with whom. I mean Jesus Christ, she’d tell Stanley, these bitches are horny!

      “Maybe they’re in some kind of full blown mid-life crisis,” Stanley had said, “but man, they do seem to be gettin’ it on.”

      Zarina believed, despite it sounding “all hippy-dippy” as her mom would say… she believed love is the thing, not sex. It was about the personal relationship; the intimacy of spirits, not bodies. You can have sex with anybody. Love only happens with someone really, really special.

      She put down the Words With Friends game she was currently winning and brewed some coffee. It made the world go round, and all.

      Her day’s first customer checked out and left, and the sound of the door clicking behind her threw Maggie into a trance.

      The dreaded sound: a soft click of the front door locked behind her mother as she left. 9-1-1 was written in huge letters next to the phone. Maggie always pretended to be asleep so her mother wouldn’t worry she’d been awake and frightened. Maggie would watch the minutes tick by on the old-fashioned alarm clock, and sometimes it would be 2:35 or 3:07. And then one day, her mother packed Maggie’s things into two brown paper grocery store bags and brought her to the home of a foster family. She told her she loved her, that she didn’t want her to feel cold or be in the dark anymore, and then she was gone. Maggie was six. She never saw her mother again.

      The gentle tinkling of the small bell that hung from the handle of the 1884 original door to her Victorian commercial building once again served as an alarm to Maggie’s daymare. She grabbed a pill from her purse and chased it with a sip of her coffee. Putting down her copy of The Scarlet Letter, she saw Ted as he entered the shop. He was holding a handful of peonies. When she saw the flowers, she knew two things: that they’d come from the huge light pink bush near his building across town, and that he’d already taken them inside to wash off all the ants that perpetually plagued the sweet-smelling blooms.

      “Good morning, beautiful lady,” he said, dramatically presenting her with the handful of freshly cut (and only slightly drippy) blooms.

      Maggie smiled like a schoolgirl. She loved the way he always said “good morning” to her, even if it wasn’t morning. She thanked him, took the flowers and put them in a big, old turquoise Ball jar on the counter.

      “Thank you for that ant removal service, dahlin,” she said, and Ted grinned at her pronunciation: her New England accent had always been sexy to him. “It was nice of you to remember I love peonies, but hate ants.”

      When she finished with the flowers, she walked around the counter and put her arms around his neck. He returned her kiss eagerly with a soft, exploratory prod of the tongue followed by a gentle grazing of her upper lip with his teeth. She slapped him playfully on the butt of his worn, faded jeans.

      “You know, I’m open for business around here, mistah, and it’s not that kind of business.”

      “I’d like to have you open for business right now upstairs, ma’am,” said Ted. He grabbed the curly auburn ponytail through the hole in the back of her baseball hat, looked into her green eyes, and pulled the cap of her hat aside so he could kiss her.

      Maggie found herself glancing over at the clock. 10:30. Hmmm. It was a slower time of morning, but she didn’t know if she could risk someone coming into the shop, especially close to lunchtime. She narrowed her eyes at him. He looked back at her, his tall frame in a fake slump, his hazel eyes drooping, and a ridiculous cartoonish frown on his face. It was the glance down at those faded jeans that won her over, for it was there that she saw his very enthusiastic interest in her. His passion for her never seemed to end, and she sighed.

      Looking directly at his rising erection, she said, “You win.