ainie refuses to keep track of how often she’s returned to the Fells Point ports. She goes when life becomes too heavy to haul and thinks about tossing herself after it, but the water level is low from lack of rain and she’d probably just break her neck. Then where would she be? In a wheelchair, stuck in front of the television for good, shoving the Spray ’N Steam until she could stand it no longer and melted Richard’s shirt, melted the ironing board, melted herself until the whole mess was a pastel-colored puddle Richard would have to get steam-cleaned by a pro.

She believes the lizard Timmy was torturing is called a skink. If she saw a skink on the porch, she’d broom that icky crawler into the shrubbery. If she saw one inside the house, well, she’d stomp it dead. She tries to convince herself what Timmy did is the same thing. But it’s not. Most kids are curious about death, but most kids also feel reflex shame when adults catch them poking carcasses. Timmy, though, had looked at her in irritation, like Richard does when she presses him about work. She’d had to collect her courage, and quick, before insisting that he flush that thing down the toilet, scrub his hands, and get to breakfast.

After he’d finished, she stepped into the bathroom to make sure the skink wasn’t clawing its way back up the bowl. Then she took a minute to appraise her mirror reflection. She patted down springy hair. Pinkied her lipstick. Pulled her pearls so the largest ones rested in the hollow of her throat. Richard didn’t look closely at her these days, but if he did, would he see the secret she kept? Even Timmy, she thought, had gotten close.

It had been after one of her dockside trances that Lainie had plodded along the anchorage before going north past Patterson Park and east on Baltimore Street. She found herself dwarfed by tall buildings, coasting between them as if by canoe. She stopped outside one of the largest buildings in sight, a black-and-gold citadel with 1920s stylings. The revolving door turned and turned, blowing in a gust that smelled of leather and ink.

Lainie considers her morning news routine intellectual aerobics, and for that same reason she’d braved the whirling door. It spat her out onto a chessboard floor of a lobby carved from what looked like solid obsidian. Cutaway views of higher floors offered glimpses into what looked like an autonomous city. The workers here had their own post office, eateries, coffee carts, corner stores, newsstands, watch repair shops, security department. Modern women in smart outfits and men with briefcases crisscrossed the lobby, straight-backed with importance.

In this self-contained world, there was no Richard Strickland. No Timmy or Tammy Strickland. No Lainie Strickland, either. She was, rather, that woman she’d left in Orlando. She wished to bathe in the sensation so she took an elevator to a small bakery to pore over the display case. She decided on something she would enjoy herself, for once. When the clerk looked at her, she said, “Lemon Butter Ring, please.” Except he hadn’t been looking at her. A man, a building regular by the looks of his shirtsleeves, said, “Gimme a Lemon Butter Ring, Jerry,” at the same time. She apologized, and the man chortled and told her to go ahead, and she insisted she oughtn’t to eat an entire butter ring by herself anyway, and he said that yes, she should, Jerry makes them better than anyone.

The man was flirting but wasn’t overbearing about it, and besides, in this midworld she was capable of anything, and when the man complimented her voice, she pretended to be inured to such fluffery and laughed it off.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve got a strong, soothing voice. You ooze patience.”

Beneath her costume of calmness, her heart raced.

“Ooze,” she said. “A word every woman wants to hear.”

The man snorted. “Say, who do you work for in this joint?”

“Oh, no one.”

“Ah, your husband, then. Whereabouts?”

“No, not that, either.”

He snapped his fingers. “Mary Kay. The girls upstairs are wild about it.”

“I’m sorry. I just came inside to—well, I just came inside.”

“Is that right? Hey, this may be a little forward, but any chance you’re looking for a job? I work at a little ad firm upstairs, and we’re hunting for a new receptionist. The name’s Bernie. Bernie Clay.”

Bernie held out his hand. Before Lainie could transfer the Lemon Butter Ring so as to accept it, she understood that everything had changed. Over the following hour, she introduced herself as Elaine, not Lainie, rode alongside Bernie on a gleaming escalator, followed him through a waiting room of trendy red chairs, and sat in his office past which ambled dozens of jolly men and secretaries who threw looks her way. Not hostile, but not friendly, either, as if wondering if the woman in the beehive had what it took.

Lainie knows she did all of this, but recalls only snippets. What she remembers in full are the rapid calculations she made regarding the schedules of her kids and husband, all of which had to be gauged before countering Bernie’s job offer, in a take-it-or-leave-it tone she couldn’t believe came out of her mouth, with her own part-time proposal—the best she could do, she said.

She hears the thump of Timmy kicking his seat at the table, hears the tentative clink of Tammy’s spoon against her bowl. Lainie rotates her head to see her reflection in the china-cabinet glass, wondering how beehives caught on in the first place. The secretaries at Klein & Saunders all have sleeker cuts, and though Lainie has only worked with them for a couple of days, she’s begun to imagine what it would feel like if her hair, too, was styled that way.