She felt comfortable, standing there naked in body and mind, talking to him. It felt as if who she was right at that moment, not who she could be, was enough. And while he was attractive, he wasn’t one of those devastating men who had a waiting list of women.

“No,” Amy shook her head, “I can do it myself.” After having been so weakly dependent on Jimmy, then a winter of mummified dependence on Leanne, Amy relished doing everything herself.

The hammering vibrated through her body and she looked up, and saw a young man, younger than her by a few years at least, on a roof of a cabin to the right of the main building. He looked down at her and he stopped work for a moment. He had a guarded look, almost mean. Either mean, or cool.  ...

She remembered standing in front of the Bowery Ballroom venue a million times, under-dressed, over-made-up and teetering in heels, getting her name checked off the list for a show before she headed in to drink 10 free vodka cranberries in the air-conditioned dark backstage, make eyes with some  ...

Jack Fletcher had walked in in his big red flannel jacket, and he wasn’t alone. He was holding a thin shiny blond girl’s hand whom Amy recognized from that awkward morning at Yoga. He nodded at Danny, but his eyes moved right over Amy, like she wasn’t even there.

She could see the yellow yolk of the full moon bleeding over the water outside. She couldn’t wait to run down the beach again. If she closed her eyes, she could feel her feet sinking into the sand and the cool rush of salty air on her skin. She rubbed at her thin legs under her long white nightgown.

Amy kept stealing glances at the girls while she thought they weren’t looking. There was a warmness to them, and old soul familiarity. They all looked her in the eye. There was no immediate other-women-weirdness, as Amy had been used to from the city.

Amy thought of the way he left her, without remorse, about the unreturned text messages, as if she had not only never even mattered to him, but never even existed. About the affair with Cassandra, and all those horrible tabloids, and then of the last two and a half months in bed. Her blood  ...

But in two months of invalidism, she had grown to feel an intense compassion and understanding for Leanne. She knew Leanne didn’t even like to be so hard around the edges, as she herself called it, but she had built up a wall of armor over years of doing battle with a lifetime of loss.

She and Monica used to go after work if they didn’t go to a movie premiere, rock show, or store launch. They’d flirt with the moody rockabilly bartender and get free vodka sodas and take home fledgling rock stars, who looked at them with moons in their eyes, like Amy or Monica -- either one,  ...