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“I couldn’t mind less,” I told her.

Her expression changed and she grew somehow remote. She had moved back to the world of music. She went to her bench, loosened her shoulders, and started playing.

I choked down the rest of my protein drink then returned to the malevolent couch. Ruby was already conjuring beauty from the piano and I felt a stab of envy. She was right there with her piano and I was miles from a horse. In spite of the obvious danger of even leaving the house, I needed to ride. I didn’t know if they’d have cleared the track enough by tomorrow for actual workouts but I thought at least I’d put in an appearance on the backstretch, go see some of the trainers I ride for, offer to hand walk a few horses. It would calm me. All of which meant that, if I was to keep my bargain with Ruby and her friend, I had to call Sal and ask him to come with me to the track at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

Just as I started thinking about retrieving my cell phone and making the call, the phone beat me to the punch and rang, the sound of it a terrible shriek against the music-filled room. I jumped up and raced over to get it out of my jacket. I looked at the incoming number, got a slightly sick feeling at what I saw, and turned the phone off. I glanced at Ruby. She just kept playing her music, not seeming to miss a note, lost in her own world.

I went back to the couch, but now I was rattled. Not only was someone trying to drown the life out of me, but my insane wife, Ava, was calling. This the third call in the last twelve hours or so. Not that I’d answered any of them. Or even listened to the voice mails she’d left. But I’d seen her number in the call log. I didn’t know exactly what her calling me meant other than she’d sniffed out the fact that I’d met a woman I liked. Ava would have smelled that from five thousand miles away.

I’d told Ruby about Ava. She hadn’t seemed too shaken about my technically still being married, but she did question me.

“You love her?” she’d asked.

“Of course, love, sure, but not in love. She’s insane.”

Ruby squinted at this.

“A lot of guys I know, the pull of an insane woman is something they never get away from.”

She was wise. And partially correct. I couldn’t imagine ever completely cutting off from Ava, particularly given that we have a ten-year-old daughter. But I didn’t want to be married to Ava anymore. I’d tried very hard for close to fifteen years. That had to be enough.

We’d met when we were young. Still both living in North Carolina. She was blond, taller than me and, a few months after I started seeing her, substantially heavier than me. The girl was bulimic. She went from one-fifteen to one-forty-five in the blink of an eye. I didn’t mind that much. There was something sensual about having a large woman covering me with her body. She had a lot of male in her too. Would lie against my back and sort of hump me. As a kid, I’d experimented with my same sex maybe a little more than was common. I’d even sort of “seen” a man a few months before I’d met Ava. But this was Grinderville, North Carolina. Not a completely asshole-of-the-universe bigoted kind of place but close. The man’s name was Jed and we’d had to be very discreet. He was forty-three and married. When I met Ava, I quickly lost interest in Jed and in the half-dozen or so women in Grinderville who chronically put themselves in my path.

When I met Ava, the whole infernal world stood still.

She was working at a geriatric home where I would go to visit my grandma. I was in Grandma Stevens’s room one day, huddled with her over the tip sheets for the nearest bush track, because well into her nineties she was still playing the horses, which I didn’t understand since at that point I’d never set foot on a track.

Grandma sent me out to look for a nurse. She couldn’t find her glasses and was convinced her roommate, Nellie Nelson, had stolen them. Nellie Nelson was, according to Grandma, a notorious kleptomaniac who had been the town nymphomaniac a few decades earlier but now, in her dotage, had switched over to kleptomania.

As I