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"Shoot! I'd have to be a moron." "He was a moron, not to appreciate you," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Hey. How's about a beer." "Oh, I'd love a beer!" Fiona jumped up, tugging down her shorts, and left the room. Maggie sank lower on the couch and listened to the sounds drifting in through the window-a car swishing past and Leroy's throaty chuckle. If this house were hers, she thought, she would get rid of all this clutter. You couldn't see the surface of the coffee table, and the layers of sofa cushions nudged her lower back uncomfortably.

"Only thing we've got is Bud Light-is that okay?" Fiona asked when she returned. She was carrying two cans and a sack of potato chips.

"It's perfect; I'm on a diet," Maggie said.

She accepted one of the cans and popped the tab, while Fiona settled next to her on the couch. "/ ought to go on a diet," Fiona said. She ripped open the cellophane sack. "Snack foods are my biggest downfall." "Oh, mine too," Maggie said. She took a sip of her beer. It was crisp-tasting and bitter; it brought memories flooding in the way the smell of a certain perfume will. How long had it been since she'd last had a beer? Maybe not since Leroy was a baby. Back then (she recalled as she waved away the potato chips), she sometimes drank as many as two or three cans a day, keeping Fiona company because beer was good for her milk supply, they'd heard. Now that would probably be frowned upon, but at the time they had felt dutiful and virtuous, sipping their Miller High Lifes while the baby drowsily nursed. Fiona used to say she could feel the beer zinging directly to her breasts. She and Maggie would start drinking when Maggie came home from work-midafternoon or so, just the two of them. They would grow all warm and confiding together. By the time Maggie got around to fixing supper she would be feeling, oh, not drunk or anything but filled with optimism, and then later at the table she might act a bit more talkative than usual. It was nothing the others would notice, though. Except perhaps for Daisy. "Really, Mom. Honestly," Daisy would say. But then, she was always saying that.

As was Maggie's mother, come to think of it. "Honestly, Maggie." She had stopped by late one afternoon and caught Maggie lounging on the couch, a beer balanced on her midriff, while Fiona sat next to her singing "Dust in the Wind" to the baby. "How have you let things get so common!" Mrs. Daley had asked, and Maggie, looking around her, had all at once wondered too. The cheap, pulpy magazines scattered everywhere, the wadded wet diapers, the live-in daughter-in-law-it did look common. How had it happened?

"I wonder if Claudine and Peter ever married," Maggie said now, and she took another sip of her beer.

"Claudine? Peter?" Fiona asked.

"On that soap opera we used to watch. Remember? His sister Natasha was trying to split them up." "Oh, Lord, Natasha. She was one mean lady," Fiona said. She dug deep into the sack of potato chips.

"They had just got engaged when you left us," Maggie said. "They were planning to throw a big party and then Natasha found out about it-remember?" "She looked kind of like this girl I always detested in elementary school," Fiona said.

"Then you left us," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Actually, now that you mention it she must not have managed to split them up after all, because a couple of years later they had this baby that was kidnapped by a demented airline stewardess." "At first I couldn't believe you had really gone for good," Maggie said. "Whole months passed by when I'd come home and switch on the TV and check what was happening with Claudine and Peter, just so I could fill you in when you got back." "Anyhow," Fiona said. She set her beer on the coffee table.

"Silly of me, wasn't it? Wherever you had gone, you surely would have been near a TV. It's not like you had abandoned civilization. But I don't know; maybe I just wanted to keep up with the story for my own sake, so that after you came back we