“Why’d you break up?”

Bette shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Beats you?” I repeated. “What, were you on vacation and when you came back, you’d just broken up?”

“No.” She sighed. “I don’t remember why.”

“Oh.”

“We just did.”

I began to say something nasty and then thought better of it. Instead, I said, “It was only a year ago and you don’t remember why you broke up?”

“I think,” said Bette in a tone that very much suggested that this was the end of the conversation, “it was one of those relationships that just fell apart.”

“Well,” I said, changing tactics. “I guess, if you dated Colleen, and I dated Tamara…”

She was not coming along for this trip. She looked at me blankly. “And…”

“And now they’re dating one another…”

“I’m glad we’re having this conversation a second time-”

“What-” I pulled a pen out of my purse. “Look.” I wrote my name and then Tamara’s and drew a line connecting them. Then I connected Tamara with Colleen using another line, and finally connected Colleen with Bette using another line. I turned it around so that Bette could look at it better. “See-”

“Yeah, you have cute handwriting.”

I laughed. “I’m saying, we’re connected by two people.”

“We are,” she agreed.

“So basically, we’ve slept together,” I finished triumphantly.

Bette, who I’d recently discovered did not understand “humor” more than 50% of the time, screwed her face up in thought and shook her head. “No.”

“Well, okay, I’m just kidding, we haven’t really slept together, I’m just pointing out-”

“No, because they’re both relationships we’ve had in the past,” Bette explained. “If, say, you had slept with Tamara and then Tamara had slept with Colleen and then I had slept with Colleen, we would have, in a categorical sense.”

“Why do you say that?”

Bette crossed her arms over her chest. She shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t know it was you, of course, but if Colleen did something that I really liked during *****, there’s a possibility that she learned it from Tamara. And there’s a possibility that Tamara learned it from you. So,” and here she leaned forward and lowered her voice a bit, “in this hypothetical equation, Alice, we have slept together.”

I did a very good job of not choking on my coffee.

Bette looked me in the eye for a moment and then leaned back, picked up another pamphlet, and started reading.

Oh, *****. She was driving me ***** crazy.