Dinah read once that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. She loved her friend, but Annie could have been a poster child for the epigram. She’d never had a plan. She’d never made a change that wasn’t thrust upon her by familiar or health conditions.

Annie had sent an email to Jeff two months earlier. That communication resulted in a lunch which ended with cocktails at Annie’s condo. She followed up with a telephone call. She invited him to continue what had been interrupted so long ago.

He was still solidly married. No one would accuse him of domestic happiness, but it appeared that he had signed on for the duration. However, he gracefully accepted her invitation. He began visiting Annie after work once or twice a week. He never initiated anything, including sex, but he was as accommodating as his caution and discretion allowed. They enjoyed daily telephone calls. According to Annie, they fell back in love.

Dinah was demi-disgusted.

It’s always trying to be around an infatuated person. Every lovesick adolescent is tiresome, and the condition grows more unattractive to witnesses as the participants age. To Dinah, Annie of late was silly, besotted, moony and most of all boring. She talked about Jeff like he was some sort of hero instead of a spineless adulterer. She seemed unable to stop herself from sharing his sweet talk or even his possessive or sexual declarations. It was a challenge for Dinah not to gag. Classic TMI.

But more than that, Dinah was struck by Annie’s attempts to rewrite her own opinions and potential. After Annie stopped doing married guys around 1980 and settled into her sad relationship with the alcoholic, she came down with both feet on marital cheating. She spoke with disdain about any adulterous situation, equally disapproving of married and unmarried participants. Somehow a few months ago that philosophy disappeared like it had never existed. It was swamped by a new conclusion: based on how happy Annie was in Jeff’s arms, she declared that she was put on this planet to love, that she was above all else a natural-born lover, and that her need for love overrode every other consideration.

Dinah heard Annie help herself to a glass of something before she mounted the stairs to the study. Her footsteps clacked on the hallway floor before she appeared in the doorway. She set her glass on the masonite pull-out at the left side of Dinah’s old oak desk, and she perched on the front of the rocking chair. After a few perfunctory social tropes she launched into a report about seeing Jeff the day before.

“That’s why I didn’t come by last night,” she explained. “I was too tired and relaxed after seeing him. I always feel so good after seeing him. In so many places.” Annie sat back then and made her mouth into a sort of leer. “He may not be a good husband,” she suggested, “but he’s the absolute best boyfriend.”

Dinah responded without words.

“And it’s the same for me,” Annie said. “I’m a really good girlfriend, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been a good wife.”

“What are you talking about?” Dinah blurted. “What makes you say that?”

Then it was Annie’s turn for wordless response.

“No really. What makes you say that?” Dinah swivelled in her wooden desk chair. “You would have made a great wife. You never wanted to work. You wanted to make a home for your man. You more than anyone I know would have enjoyed curling up at his slippered feet after he returned home, hearing about his day.”

“You think?”

“I know. But you saying that reminds me of a similar statement my brother has made more than once. He as much as says he wouldn’t have been a good father.”

“Mark? He would have been a great dad! I mean, look at the fabulous job he does uncle-ing. Is that a word?”

Dinah chuckled. “It probably should be. Anyway, I completely agree with you. It wasn’t his idea not to have children. I remember how he collected Dad-stories and mementos to pass on to his future kids. But now it’s like he’s trying to revise his past so his present is consistent with it or something.”

“Does he actually say he would have been a bad father?”

“No. That’s more Barb’s line, about herself. Like her relationship with her mother was so toxic she doesn’t want to take a chance on repeating it. Mark’s claim is not as jarring as that. He keeps saying that when he’s around an infant he has no desire to cuddle it, but he can’t resist picking up a puppy.”

“But most men don’t have baby love till they meet their own…”

“Tell me about it. That’s what I keep saying to him. But my words are not changing his.”

It wasn’t Annie’s subject so she changed it. She had other ideas on her mind. The two friends discussed new shoes and the elaborate plans for an old friend’s daughter’s wedding shower and the current state of another friend’s divorce trials (literally: the once-loving couple had now been in litigation for six years) and what shirts Annie wanted to buy for Jeff (that was the last conversational straw for Dinah). Then Annie betook herself home.

Dinah was about done with the day. She pulled the old train off the siding and discovered it no longer had much steam. She discovered a few fresh optimisms in herself, about her future, and she decided she’d like to meet her 2025 self.

And she wondered a little more about her Mark’s and Annie’s self-derogatory interpretations. She even tried to run some for herself. Could she say she would have been a bad stay-at-home mom? Could she figure she would have performed less well if she’d tried to make a living at art?

She couldn’t say or think those opinions. But Dinah was pretty sure that either of those alternative courses would have been boring.