I didn’t expect her to come. I had called her, of course, out of politeness. Babe, you’ve got to come visit, I had said. You’ll make my night.

I’ll try, she had replied. I didn’t buy it for a second. I’ll try. I’d heard those two words so many times the phrase meant nothing to me anymore.

So that is why my jaw falls open the moment I spot a head of curly red hair with a hand groping around in my refrigerator.

“Molly?”

She pulls out a Bud Light and turns around. “Abby!” she squeals, and throws her arms around my neck.

I take a second to regain my balance and pat her a couple times on the back. The abandoned refrigerator door makes a dull thud as it slams shut. “Hey.” I drop my arms from the embrace. I can feel her cold beer pressed against my back, and her hand running up and down my spine, and after, oh, ten seconds or so, I am completely aware of my arms hanging limp by my sides.

She takes a step back and grins. “We have so much to catch up on!”

I nod with more enthusiasm than I actually feel and excuse myself from the guests of my open-house, who are munching down on crab cakes and flipping through real estate brochures and don’t give a rat’s ass where I go.

Molly pulls the sliding glass door open and I follow. She hops up and sits on the railing of my deck. I eye her white yoga pants and secretly hope that she sat on a spot with bird shit on it.

“So,” she begins, taking a box of Virginia Slims out of her Gucci purse. She pops one in her mouth and offers me the box. I pull one out. She reaches over to light mine, and then takes a puff of her own. Leaning back on her hands, she tilts her chin upwards and blows smoke into the dark air.

“So.” I’m still wondering when she’s going to tell me the real reason she’s here, sitting on my deck, in the middle of September.

She smiles at me and sighs. “I met someone.”

I knew it.

“He’s real sweet,” she continues, crossing her legs. “His name’s Seth.”

I check the railing carefully before jumping up to sit on it. “So, how’d you meet him?” I take another drag. Routine questions, routine answers. At the supermarket; his cart collided with mine and we hit it off right away, she’d say. At the bowling alley; my ball got stuck in the gutter and he rescued it, she’d say.

“At work,” she giggles. “He came in to check up on us after the hold-up this afternoon.”

It takes a minute for this to register. “Wait. Wait.” I’m still trying to piece it together. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, you didn’t see it on TV? SalonBlast got robbed this afternoon! Yeah, this guy in a ski mask came in with a gun and demanded that we hand over all the money in the register. Well, he came in at, like, noon, so there wasn’t that much money in there to begin with. Carrie was behind the counter, and you know Carrie—she didn’t put up a fight or anything. She gave him the eighty dollars in the drawer and he just, like, left.” Molly says this all very fast and without taking a breath. She finally stops for a moment and takes a smoke. Before I can get a word in, she starts again. “So anyways, they sent some guys up, and that’s how I met Seth.”

I blink. This certainly wasn’t a met-him-at-the-supermarket story, but she was making it sound like one. “Hold on.” I smash the butt of my cigarette into an ashtray. “Seth is a cop?”

She rolls her eyes and taps her cigarette with her finger. Ashes fall like snowflakes over the railing. “Yes, he’s a cop. But he’s also very nice. And he has a good butt.” Like that makes up for the part where he works for the Seattle Police Department.