Martin exits I-89 before he needs to and progresses town by town. He keeps pulling over to eyeball a fiery spruce or an outcropping of mica, admire quaint inns with ivy wreathed around their VACANCY signs and crumbling breweries offering hard apple cider tastings. He’s eager to reach Tunbridge, but knows anticipation is the greatest pleasure. He stops to buy a mason jar of corn whiskey from a sweet old man on a porch, thinking how happy he’ll be once he reaches Lola and Dot’s barn. Then, realizing his spirits are at that peak where they’re in danger of toppling over into confusion or sadness, he drinks two beers in a gloomy pub. The people here are not part of the world of ivied inns and apple cider tastings; they’re leathery and anonymous, faces raised mutely to the TV, and Martin feels comfortable among them: alone and unseen.

[...] Dot, for her part, had been cowed by Martin’s longstanding friendship with Lola, whose moods she was still trying to interpret. During their brief early breakup, Lola had sat for hours on Martin’s fire escape in the hideous frilly nightgown inherited from her hated mother, smoking like a junkie in recovery, enumerating all of Dot’s microscopic flaws: she was insecure about her grammar, she under-tipped, she made fun of the acting in Lola’s beloved Ozu films. Martin defended Dot: “She’s the only person you’ve ever dated who gets up before noon and goes to a job every day. Plus, those lips, that ass.”

“She was riding in Marge Hasselbeck’s truck,” Lola says. She pauses for a moment to stare at Dot’s back. “Did you meet her at Ginger’s birthday? Lives about a mile down the road. Our closest neighbor. And her son looks, I swear, the spitting image of Julyana: all otherworldly and translucent. Unfortunately, he’s a real moron. This little boy, I mean.” (Julyana was a drag queen, videographer, and fire eater Martin and Lola had been vaguely friends with a million years ago.) [...]

She's also some kind of doyenne of the local crafts scene.