Free A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott

more.”
    “But you’re married now,” Elizabeth says. “You’re living with Tommy.”
    “I know,” she says wearily. She’s heard it before. “I know. And I ride the train home to Westbury instead of Valley Stream. And I live in an apartment with Tommy instead of at home with my parents. But what do I have to look forward to? Everything’s over.”
    “Oh, Joanne.” She tries to think for her: She has her job, but she’s an executive secretary already, has been for the past four years. Good salary, nonpromotable. She has children to look forward to, but not for a while, not with Tommy just out of law school, still struggling to pay off his loans. She may buy a house someday, but when, how far away?
    “What does anybody have to look forward to?” she says, feebly. “And you’re married. You’re lucky.”
    She stares at her drink. After a while, the waitress comes and they order two more. Joanne glances at her watch but says nothing.
    “You want something to eat?” Elizabeth asks. She nods.
    At the hors d’oeuvre table, Bert hums as he puts the tiny meatballs into a small white dish. “How you been, darling?” he asks.
    “As good as I can be,” she tells him, glad to smile, to joke a little. Feeling guilty that she’s glad. He laughs, his teeth whiter than his tall chef’s cap. “Well, you can’t beat that,” he says. “You just got to do your best.”
    A man in a dark suit steps in front of her, holding out a small plate. “Yes, sir,” Bert says. “Have some of this nice ham here.”
    “You know what it’s like?” Joanne says when she returns to the booth.
    Elizabeth offers her a toothpick and she takes it, holds it. “It’s like when I got busted in high school, remember?”
    She laughs, spearing a meatball. “I remember you telling me about it.” Joanne had gone from St. Elizabeth’s to the public school just down the street, “the incubator of atheism,” as one of the nuns called it, while Elizabeth went on to Blessed Virgin High. They parted ways for a few years then, while Elizabeth learned why she was sick of the Catholic Church and Joanne discovered why she couldn’t live without it, andwere reacquainted in their senior year when they both started going to the same bars; as if, despite the efforts of the nuns and the atheists, they had both ended up looking for the same thing.
    Not, Elizabeth recalls, that Joanne ever had any trouble finding it. Boyfriends. Dates. Sex. Romance. Her appeal to men has always been legendary and puzzling. “She’s such a homely, wiry little thing,” Elizabeth’s mother used to say, and her girlfriends at college, who were dazed by the number of men Joanne met each time she came to visit, decided she was, “Not pretty, but attractive, sexy.” Elizabeth has always attributed it to every man’s fantasy of a twelve-year-old with breasts.
    She was with one of her many boyfriends, parked by a reservoir somewhere, when a policeman, just checking, found three joints in her pocketbook, in the plastic case where she stored her tampons. The charges were eventually dropped, but her father told her then and there that she would never be allowed to go away to college, or to leave home until the day she was married.
    “Well, after that,” Joanne says now, “I made myself sick wishing I could go back to that night. Do it over. I just kept thinking if I could only relive it, go backward and do it over right.”
    “Yeah,” Elizabeth says, chewing the tasteless meatball, glad to have an answer for her, a point to make. “But that’s because you wanted to do it differently, so you wouldn’t have gotten caught. You wouldn’t want to do your wedding any differently.”
    “Yes I would,” she says quickly. “I’d pay more attention. I’d make it seem to last longer. Maybe I’d even put it off for another year. Maybe even two years.”
    Elizabeth smiles at her. “But it would still have to be over, eventually.”
    “No,” she says, childish,