The first time her husband laid eyes on her, it was almost love at first sight. A traveling Cubicle Reconfiguration & Office Furniture Relocation Consultant, he stopped one Thursday afternoon to fill up in Fenwick and overheard the gas attendant telling tourists in a red T-bird convertible about the tea house’s BLT special: double decker piled high with pork belly, braised dandelion greens, and fried green tomatoes on homemade challah. You folks come back and say it isn’t the best sandwich you ever ate, I’ll fill your tank for free. The old man sized up the tea house woman’s future husband’s BMW and said, I don’t gamble with Premium, and took his money. Inside, the tea house woman’s silhouette against one of the floor-to-ceiling dining room windows stopped him: The instant my eyes rested on her, he wrote in a letter to his secretary, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Zepha, his secretary, whose home was and would continue to be his home away from home, cherished this letter as proof of her claim on him, and when years later she died from esophageal cancer a hospice nurse would remove it gently from her fingers and give it to her mother, who, at the funeral, would shove it back into his chest and hiss, Shame! On both of you! After the funeral, he would drive at high speed into the largest of the ancient holm oaks around which the tea house’s truffle orchard had been established, centuries before, by the very first tea house woman. Guests seated at the windows were witnesses to the crash, and while it is true that the Gleason sisters had the best view of the orchard it is not true that they were the first, as they claim to this day, to call for help. In fact, it was that year’s recently crowned Miss Teen Fenwick, Miriam Talbo who stood, pointed toward the orchard, and fainted, upsetting her tea tray, which alerted the elderly Drs. Lessing in the corner farthest from the windows that medical attention was called for. (Miriam was excused from school because the women of Soroptimist International of Fenwick had chosen that day to honor her with a luncheon, during which club President Lala Gleason was to present her with the Violet Richardson Award for her volunteer service mentoring young girls.) Dr. Dolly Lessing took charge of reviving Miriam, while her husband Dr. Terrence Lessing directed the men (numbering three, including himself, Lank, the gardener, and Sam, the tea house woman’s father). Worried the BMW might explode like in a movie (they couldn’t be sure about foreign cars), they pulled the dead man out, carried him into the kitchen, and laid him on the table. Unable to look at him like that, the tea house woman went outside, where eventually she found his letter in the breast pocket of his suit jacket still draped around his passenger-side seat. Atop a mass of fallen acorns leaving divots that would later weal along the undersides of her thighs, she sat with her back pressed hard against the scarred bark of that ancient oak, dry-eyed, reading what she assumed to be his suicide note.