When I met Jenna she was standing behind her mother in the supermarket aisle. Gloria had handed her a red basket and a sink-attachable water filter.
"That's a mistake," I interrupted, shaking my carton of orange juice. "It leaks out the sides. You know the way kids hijack a fire hydrant?" I was still a little drunk from the night before and talking from behind my hands.
"Thank you," Gloria said, and took the box away from Jenna � whom I only then noticed � and returned it to the wrong shelf. She asked me what I was shopping for. I took an illustrative gulp of orange juice and she smiled. While we spoke Gloria kept her arms folded across her chest � hiding her breasts, I later speculated, because they were superior to her daughter's and might distract me. But Gloria often underestimated Jenna's initial charms: a tall, if too full, body, a face vaguely sullied by her father's influence, the elegant narrowness of her mother's features pounded out of it, yet with its own mannish appeal. Lingeringly drunk in a housewares aisle, you'd be hard pressed to do much better.
Gloria left the two of us to find dimmer switches and Jenna slowly warmed up to me, shyly rotating a jar of gourmet salsa. I told her my theory that since fat people crowd up the sidewalks and subways, a law should be passed to make fat people nocturnal. It would free up all the overrun urban areas. Skinny days and fat nights, how could you possibly say no to that?
"What if you're friends with a fat person?" Jenna said.
"Call them on the phone," I said. "Or wait for the weekend. Weekends are for everyone. I'm not prejudiced."
Jenna shook her head courteously. "It sounds like science fiction. You know, The Time Machine. With the Morlocks."
"I don't read that crap," I said.
When Gloria returned, she suggested we all meet up for coffee that afternoon since Jenna was new in town. We could try the place by Bleecker where the windows are intentionally broken. It would be fun.
Except when I arrived at the caf�, sober and clean-shaven, Jenna was alone. I shouldn't have been surprised; Gloria's easy invitation should have alerted me to a game of bait and switch. Jenna crossed her legs as I imagine her mother coached her from childhood, girlishly tucked her hair behind her ears, and told me all about Arkansas. It isn't true that to pronounce it Ar-kansas will earn you a fine. Four weeks later we were fucking, albeit gently. Like her mother, Jenna was a lady.
It only took another four weeks to learn that I couldn't spend more than a day in Jenna's company. At first it was just her meekness that bothered me, but soon enough it was her staccato laugh, her stringy blond hair, the freckles dotting her snubby Protestant nose � from some shameful impurity centuries ago, no doubt a rape � and the heft of her tennis-muscle thighs. She drank water from a wine glass. She never sat on the floor. Even her name began to bother me: why couldn't it be Jennifer? Or Jen? What the hell is Jenna? Scandinavian?

When I met her father, I was just about to get rid of her. He was a businessman who spent half his time in London, and while in the States for a weekend he took us to an

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