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  For my mom, Pat Geiger

  Already I miss Troy

  in the summer.

  My body propped

  on the raft at Booth Lake,

  feet stirring the weeds.

  —FRANCESCA ABBATE, Troy, Unincorporated

  If you live,

  you look back and beg

  for it again, the hazardous

  bliss before you know

  what you would miss.

  —ADA LIMÓN, “BEFORE”

  Prologue

  Palm Springs, 2019

  Sherri stands outside the employee entrance of the Palm Springs Art Museum and stares at the scrubby mountain behind the building. The early-bird hikers in their floppy hats have captured their sunrise photos and are making their way to the mouth of the trail that lets out just beyond the parking lot. Almost forty years earlier, she’d gone hiking there for the first time. She was drunk, and had wandered over from the Riviera in her bikini and a pair of flip-flops. She still can’t believe she’d made it down without a broken ankle—or worse.

  It seems everyone in town is on vacation except for her, and that’s fine. She likes to keep busy, even on her days off. Her boyfriend, Bayard, keeps telling her she should retire, but she can’t imagine what she’d do with herself. She takes a deep breath and prepares for her day the same way she used to brace herself at the start of her shift at the Playboy resort back when she was a Bunny.

  She catches her reflection in the glass door—as a special events manager, she knows that it’s important to look like she’s someone who can rise to an occasion. Her hair isn’t as wild as it once was, but it’s still curly, and she’s dyed it the color of champagne so that she won’t look like George Washington. Her nails gleam, her makeup is perfect, and one extra button of her silk blouse is undone. She steps inside and shivers in the blast of air-conditioning. Her feet are tucked tight into the stiletto heels she insists on wearing despite the stern warning from her podiatrist about bunions and hammertoes. She loves the efficient clicks of her measured steps against the parquet floor and the way the sound echoes with purpose through the galleries. In the rhythm she hears the stresses in the lines of the T. S. Eliot poem her father used to recite for her each and every morning when she was a girl: “Dawn points, and another day / Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides. I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.”

  Her first appointment of the day is with grooms Steven and Byron, and Char, their wedding planner. Char is concerned that the hallway leading out to the patio area where the couple will exchange vows features a photography exhibit of dying AIDS patients, one of whom is giving his lover a blowjob from his hospital bed. “What will their families think?” Char asks. Sherri has worked with Char before. She knows she’s trying to downplay the museum because she gets kickbacks from some of the other venues around town.

  “Well, I hope they’ll think what you think,” Sherri says, ignoring Char and addressing the couple directly. She can feel a special kind of energy rise up in her—she knows she has the confidence she needs to sell a space. “You guys love and value art. That’s why you live here, right? And that’s why you’re thinking of having your wedding at the museum. This is a place that epitomizes your values. There’s no denying the images are powerful, and if you ask me, they’ll remind your guests that life is fragile, and the love you have for each other is absolutely precious and beautiful.”

  She slips their deposit check into a manila folder, winks conspiratorially at Char, and runs upstairs to the museum entrance for her next appointment, a meeting with billionaire James Wingra’s much younger wife, Fiona, who is thinking of joining their board. Fiona is fresh out of USC. She’s dressed for Coachella in her boho sundress and wedge espadrilles, a French bulldog at her heel. She’s what people in Sherri’s office call a “walker”—there are lots of walkers in town, whether they are young, gay men hanging off the arms of wealthy widows, or women like Fiona who suction themselves to much older men.

  Sherri doesn’t want to tell Fiona that dogs aren’t allowed in the museum, so she suggests they meet outdoors instead. They sit at a table overlooking the Černý sculptures, eight-foot-tall steel babies that appear to crawl around in a giant sandpit. “Their faces look like heating vents,” Fiona says with an expression of confusion and displeasure.

  “Bar codes,” Sherri says. “They represent dehumanization. I think they look like swarming ants from a distance, don’t you? It was quite a coup for us to get them. The artist is from Prague, a real renegade. He rose to fame for painting the Soviet tank pink.”

  “Oh, right. Sure.” Fiona gazes off into the distance. Sherri almost feels sorry for her because she’s so clearly out of her element. She’s lovely, with a little turned-up nose, pouty mouth, and shiny shoulders. Sherri has so much advice she wishes she could share with the younger woman, but Fiona wouldn’t listen to Sherri any more than Sherri had listened to the people who’d tried to steer her down a different path back in the day. Fiona brightens. “Sculpture is my favorite!” She says this as though she’s describing her favorite flavor of ice cream.

  After the meeting, Sherri notices that Fiona’s dog had taken a dump right outside the front door. She runs to the café and grabs a napkin to clean it up, washes her hands, and spends the next twenty minutes timing how long it takes for the elevator to travel to the third floor and back down. She needs to calculate how much time it takes to transport sixty elderly guests to the upper gallery in time for a fundraiser. Sherri doesn’t mind the boring minutiae of event planning, because she knows too well that the smallest overlooked detail could turn a party into a disaster.

  She chats with the security guards and the cleaning people while she works—she knows all of their names, and the names of their spouses, children, and grandchildren. They like her because she never pulls rank. She’ll stay late to stack chairs and collect soiled linens. She’s no stranger to hard, physical work, and she never complains. That’s a lesson she carried from her Bunny days—you never let on when you’re exhausted or angry. She tries not to let on that she’s upset because the director of development was recently let go, and Sherri was asked to assume his duties in addition to her own. She plans to take it up with management, but she doesn’t complain to her staff that her salary hasn’t changed, even though his earnings were almost twice her own.

  While eating lunch at her desk, she startles when she opens an email from Jerry Derzon. He almost never emails. She reads that he’s suffering from stage-four pancreatic cancer, and it is time for her to return home (East Troy will always be home) to deal with the building he’s been managing all these years. The news makes her heart heavy—as heavy as a Chevy, as Jerry would say. She doesn’t have the energy or the will to pretend otherwise.

  Back at the house, she sits at the edge of the pool with her submerged legs moving in slow circles, the late-afternoon sun bear
ing down on her, a bead of sweat rolling down her back. She’s on her second gin and tonic. So, Jerry is sick, she tells herself, again and again, remembering the smell of the rum-soaked Crooks cigars he used to smoke. Jerry. Is. Sick. She thinks of the gold crown on his incisor that gleamed when he smiled, how he’d kept a yellowed linen handkerchief in his front pocket to dab away his sweat. She reverses the direction of her leg circles. Sick, that’s what Jerry is.

  Jerry’s poor health will change things for her. She never would have believed that Jerry of all people would have become her unlikely savior all those years ago. It was because of Jerry that she was able to leave Wisconsin and embark on this new life. She’d read once about giant machines in Los Angeles that keep the salt water out of the fresh water aquifers under the city; if the machines were to stop working, the whole city’s water supply would become tainted. Jerry had been like that for her, a force that kept her past and her suffocating guilt from contaminating her present. But now he’s preparing for his own absence, and she’ll finally have to go back to East Troy after almost forty years away and deal with the messes she’d made, back when she was in the midst of all her foolishness.

  No. She can’t possibly return. She looks around her yard and watches a hummingbird dart its beak into the chuparosa. She has a pretty, organized life with everything she’s ever wanted: sunshine, a job she’s good at, a lovely home in the Movie Colony district, modern furniture. The pool people come on Tuesdays, the cleaners on Fridays. She and Bayard have standing court times for tennis and golf and pinochle with friends, lots of friends. Even her underground sprinklers are on timers, watering her garden at standard intervals.

  She looks at the slumbering San Jacinto Mountains in the distance. She thinks of oak trees and fields of soybean and corn, crumbling barns and dairy bars, her father’s dusty poetry collections, stilettos, torn nylons, black ice, and Bach—and of that horrible day when Arthur, her dear Arthur, was suspended in the air, his back arched, his hands shot up above his head, the light on the water dazzling. The sky was a glorious backdrop of purple, blue, orange, and red. Late-summer sunsets in Wisconsin were always the most violent and dramatic, and that one was burned onto the backs of her eyelids. She saw it all the time, along with Arthur in the foreground, a floating arc suspended in Sherri’s mind—an eyebrow raised in confusion, an apostrophe about to release possession.

  CHAPTER ONE

  East Troy, 1981

  Roberta was late.

  Sherri waited for her friend outside of the family store on the town square, shivering, her stomach in knots, her ears tuned for the sound of approaching cars. Under her parka she wore her favorite Junior House outfit, which she’d purchased on clearance at Waal’s Department Store in Walworth, a burgundy velour skirt with a pink tie and a matching pink blouse. She’d loved it when she first bought it, but that morning she worried that her clothing made her look like a priss, and the heavy fabric felt stained from sadness because she’d worn it to her mother’s funeral the week before.

  In her bag she carried a pair of narrow shoes with smart heels that she wore when she played the organ, and a red string bikini that wasn’t exactly stolen, but borrowed. She’d slipped it out of her friend Jeanne’s sister’s drawer and into the front pocket of her pants when nobody was looking, as inconspicuous as a wad of Kleenex. Claire was bustier than Sherri, and the fabric was stretched thin across the chest and rear, but where else could Sherri find a string bikini in January in the middle of Wisconsin?

  She hated wearing a hood, but she pulled hers over her head because she was freezing, and she’d spent hours trying to tame her crazy, curly hair, deciding finally to pull it back into a ponytail the size of a small hedge. She checked her makeup for the hundredth time in her reflection in the store window. If Roberta didn’t arrive soon, the light mist of sleet would make her foundation and mascara run, and ruin the cerulean eyeshadow that she’d swabbed all the way to her eyebrows; she’d read in Tiger Beat magazine that light blue was the best color for hazel eyes like hers. Her lips were smeared with Cover Girl’s Shimmering Shell, an opalescent nude shade she thought was more sophisticated than coral or pink. She hoped the sparkles would make her look iridescent, like she’d emerged from a gauzy dream instead of a small town that was notable for its rich soil. It felt strange—wrong, even—to wear so much makeup in East Troy on a cold, gray Tuesday morning.

  She could have waited inside, but the apartment she’d shared with her mother had grown claustrophobic. Sherri felt so drained from taking care of Muriel while also holding herself together that she had nothing more to give. She looked beyond her reflection into the abandoned wreckage of her late father’s watch repair shop below the family’s apartment and felt another pang of sorrow. Losing her mother was a body blow, and the loss of her father three years earlier still managed to shock her system with grief, like a cracked tooth exposed to cold.

  Sherri’s father, Lane, had been a confirmed bachelor until he met Muriel. He was much older than her friends’ fathers, and he was also quieter and slower. Unlike the sturdy German and Eastern European farmers in the area, he was small and balding, with bushy white eyebrows and an Adam’s apple that pointed out of his neck like an elbow. He’d been better suited for intricate machines and the steady beat of time than the erratic natures of people. Sherri used to love working by his side while the chorus of clocks hanging on pegboard walls dinged and chimed behind them. He didn’t talk much, but he did love to read poems out loud to Sherri, especially the ones that made him sad, as if sadness were a form of pleasure for him. Rilke was his favorite: “Everything is far and long gone by,” he would say at the end of the day, and “harry the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.” By the time Sherri was twelve, she could dismantle, clean, and reassemble the whole movement on a watch and recite the first section of The Sonnets to Orpheus from memory.

  The shop had been silent since his death. Between the slits in the shades, she could see the empty cash register yawning open, and boxes of yellowed paperwork and his remaining inventory of crowns, gaskets, rotors, hands, and wristbands gathering dust. The Chamber of Commerce was always after her mother to wash the porous cream city bricks and rent out the neglected storefront space, fearing it made the town of East Troy appear less prosperous—what a joke. They finally hung a FOR LEASE sign in the window and hadn’t had a single bite in over a year.

  Sherri’s mother had suggested she open a “this and that” store in the space, selling stationery, pinecone wreaths, painted pots, and other useless stuff she referred to brightly as “bric-a-brac.” “People will come from all over,” she’d said, but Sherri had no desire to hawk useless junk, because she had other plans—plans that hinged on Roberta’s arrival.

  She turned to face the square. There had been several fierce blizzards that winter, and the snow was piled so high around the perimeter that she could only see the American flag hanging like a frozen sheet on the pole beyond the squat, red brick bandstand. Part of her wished she were a kid again so that she could climb the snow bluffs and sled down the small berms on her mother’s vinyl placemats. She’d loved playing in the square until she’d overheard Roberta’s mom say that hooligans with nothing better to do hung out there. Sherri hadn’t wanted to be thought of as a bad kid, and she wasn’t, not with her mom to take care of. Unlike Roberta, she’d never had the luxury to misbehave. It was Roberta who ended up smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine at the picnic tables, Roberta who lost her virginity in the bandstand, Roberta whom their classmates thought of (respectfully) as a “bad kid.”

  The businesses around the square were slowly limping to life. Giles was serving breakfast, and the air smelled of sausage and their famous cinnamon rolls. The desk lamp in the window of Haskell’s Insurance glowed green, and on the other side of the square, probably in front of the tavern, she could hear someone shoveling snow and ice from the sidewalk.

  Marshall’s department store on the corner wouldn’t open until nine o’clock,
the same time her interview was supposed to start, which was in, what … twenty-five minutes? Sherri checked the time again on her art deco antique watch. Like the bathing suit, it wasn’t exactly stolen. An old lady from Whitewater had brought it in for repair and never picked it up. After a year or so, her father had told Sherri she could keep it. Sherri didn’t generally like old things, but she loved that watch. It had a delicate gold chain for a band and an elongated, angular bezel that suddenly reminded her of the shape of her mother’s coffin. It was 8:38, and it took twenty minutes to get to Lake Geneva. Sherri began to hope that Roberta had overslept so that she could avoid this fool’s errand, but just then Roberta veered off Highway 15 at breakneck speed and pulled up in her rusted-out Chevy Chevelle. She came to a loud stop and reached across to unlock the passenger door.

  “Think we’ll get there in time?” Sherri asked before getting in.

  “We’re fine.” Roberta threw her cigarette out the window. “Let’s go. It’s just down the road a piece. Traffic in Milwaukee was the shits. Should have only taken half an hour to get here.”

  With her red blush, thick eyeliner, and blue mascara, Roberta looked like she was ready for a night on the town. They’d been best friends their whole lives, a friendship that felt predestined and sisterly because their mothers had delivered the girls on the same day. When they were younger, Roberta had buck teeth so severe that she needed to wear headgear to school, while Sherri had massive curls like Slinkies for hair, and a loud laugh.

  The girls had been lost in their own private world. They’d wear their clothes inside out and their shoes on the wrong feet, and they’d walk backward down the hallways, their ponytails on their foreheads. When the kids looked at them funny, which they always did, Sherri and Roberta would say, “Didn’t you hear? It’s backwards day!” and squeal with laughter. They were boy crazy. In winter, they’d spend long afternoons in Roberta’s bedroom composing love notes that they’d never send to their latest romantic interests. In summer, they’d have picnics in the square, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking milk out of Roberta’s dad’s empty whiskey bottle because they thought it made them look cool. They’d lie on their backs and stare at the sky, planning their weddings at Linden Terrace and picking names for their children. One summer, Sherri and Roberta both had a crush on Trent Eagan, the lifeguard, and they’d go to the deep end of the public swimming area at Booth Lake and practice the dead man’s float, holding their breath almost as long as the Japanese pearl divers they’d read about in Social Studies, trying to trick him into thinking they needed to be saved.