thousand times. Dave had spun her a story of life in New England as vivid as any of the fairy tales she’d told her sister: a cottage on top of a dune at the edge of an ocean, trips to New York City to see the shows, or to go dancing at the nightclubs. He knew how to sail—he’d picked it up one summer working as a waiter in Charlevoix, a resort town in Northern Michigan—and he ice-skated, and told Jo he’d teach her how to ski. “We’re going to have adventures,” he said, with his glinting smile, and Jo found herself unable to resist smiling back.
Jo submitted her teaching application to a dozen school districts within an hour’s drive of Boston, and scheduled interviews at three of them. She packed up her bedroom, as well as the boxes from Ann Arbor that she’d never emptied, and loaded them into the back of Dave’s Mustang. They made arrangements with the rabbi at Adath Israel for a Sunday-morning ceremony in his office, a luncheon for both families at the Caucus Club downtown, a night in the brand-new Pontchartrain Hotel.
The Saturday night before the wedding, Jo told Dave that she wanted to be alone.
“Old-fashioned,” he said, and lifted her hand to his mouth for a kiss. “All right. Whatever my lambie wants.” He’d moved out of the apartment in Ann Arbor that he’d shared with three other fellows and was “camping out,” as he put it, with his older brother Danny.
Jo spent a long time in the bathroom that night, curling her hair, applying her eyeliner, flicking the pencil up at the corner, into a little wing, like Shelley had taught her; putting on lipstick, rubbing it off, and putting it on again. Her best outfit was the kilt and forest-green sweater she’d worn to Passover at Shelley’s. She got dressed, left her bedroom without looking at her wedding dress, which hung on a hook on the back of the door, called “goodnight” to her mother, and stepped out into the first warm night of spring.
She couldn’t remember where she’d heard the name of the bar. Gigi’s, it was called, and it was just off Congress Street in downtown Detroit. Jo drove as if she were in a dream. She parked the car on the street, made sure it was locked, and walked down three steps, through an unmarked door, and into the bar, where the lights were dim and the air was a fog of cigarette smoke, hairspray, and perfume. A dozen stools were lined up around the bar, six wooden booths stood along the wall, and it smelled like every other bar that Jo had ever been in, a mixture of tobacco and the sour tang of beer. Peggy Lee was on the jukebox, singing “Fever,” and a man behind the bar was drying glasses with a white towel. The man’s hair was cut so short that it stood up in bristles, and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to reveal an anchor tattoo. At the end of the bar, two women were talking, their heads so close together that their temples almost touched. Four women sat together at a table toward the back. Behind them, in the small cleared space, two other women slow-danced.
“What can I get you?” Jo blinked, and saw that the man behind the bar was actually a woman. At least, she sounded female, and what Jo had translated as stockiness was probably breasts, bound tight. The bartender looked at Jo, took in her startled expression, and smiled kindly. “First time?”
Jo nodded and asked for a Grasshopper.
“Are you meeting someone?” the bartender asked as she poured and shook and stirred. Jo sipped her sweet, frothy drink and shook her head. This was a mistake, she thought. What if she saw someone she knew? What if one of the girlfriends she said she’d been out with called the house and her mother, or Dave, learned that she’d been lying? What if she crashed the car on her way home, and . . .
Someone tapped her shoulder. Jo turned and saw a woman with bobbed dark-blond hair, a man’s button-down shirt, and a vest on top. Her body was shapely and solid, and her eyes were bright and interested.
“Do I know you?” Jo asked.
“Would you like to?” the woman replied. Jo could see the strong line of her jaw, but her voice was feminine, light and teasing.
“Yes,” Jo said. It felt like she was watching someone in