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tub of trail mix for what seemed like hours.
    He’d ripped a hole in the hard plastic and was getting at the nuts and seeds through the side of the tub. When it was almostempty, he turned the thing upside down and dumped the remaining mix into his mouth, his enormous pink tongue lapping around the raggedy hole searching for one last sunflower seed or chocolate-covered raisin. Then, with a sigh of regret, he tossed the empty tub into the bushes and lumbered to his feet. He started toward us. At the time he looked about ten feet tall, though I later learned he couldn’t have been more than six.
    “Oh, God!” I cried.
    “Be quiet and put your hands in the air,” Gwen said matter-of-factly.
    “Is he going to eat us?” I whimpered.
    “Bears are herbivores,” Gwen whispered back. “He’s probably just after more trail mix. We’re slowly—very slowly—going to start to back away from the picnic table, okay? Keep your hands above your head and your mouth shut. Just do what I do.”
    Perhaps it was Gwen’s calm and seemingly disinterested response to the bear’s approach, or maybe he remembered that he’d already pillaged the best of our goodies. In any case, he stopped in his tracks as we began our forward-facing retreat. He sniffed the air, turning his head slowly from side to side, let out a huge yawn, and then, with almost balletic grace, pirouetted around and lumbered off into the woods.

    Questions were raised about what we were doing outside when we’d been expressly told not to leave our tent, but Gwen’s level-headed handling of the bear “attack”—as it quickly became known—mitigated any disciplinary action. Somehow, undeservedly, my star rose with Gwen’s after the incident. Upon our return to the main camp, word spread quickly about our adventure. Older girls who’d looked right through me until then suddenly knew my name. And, most important and wonderful for me, Gwen Boyland and I became friends.
    Initially, I worried that she was too sophisticated and popular for our closeness to last for very long. But I learned over the course of the next few weeks that Gwen, too, had her weaknesses. Ones that, happily for me, tended to be counterbalanced by my strengths. Where she was impulsive, I was strategic. When she tended to get bored or restless, I demonstrated inner resources and initiative. We helped smooth each other’s unfinished edges. And our backgrounds were different enough for each of us to consider the other special and somewhat exotic. For the next half a dozen summers we were inseparable. The Boyland Dairy farm was only three miles outside of Woodhaven, so we saw each other whenever my family was in “the country.”
    College changed all that. I went to Brown. Gwen spent half a semester at Berkshire Community College before dropping out to marry a high school basketball star. It lasted less than a year and turned out to be one of her more enduring romances. The brashness that had helped her face down our bear ended up undermining her increasingly less-concerted efforts to forge any permanent relationships, just as the timidity that gripped me that same night made the security and routine of marriage so appealing. We remained friends, though, getting together whenever we could to catch up.
    Things changed even more when I became a mother. I remember visiting Gwen at an apartment she was renting in Lee—in a chopped-up Victorian in desperate need of a paint job and rewiring—with Olivia in diapers and Franny in my arms. Gwen was still smoking then, and the place smelled of cigarettes and beer. The shower was running when she opened the door, and a few minutes after we’d gotten settled in the living room a man walked through with a towel wrapped around his waist.
    “Behave!” Gwen had told him after he did a little jig in front of my daughters.
    “You first,” he shot back.
    What bothered me most about the visit was not that Gwen seemed at such loose ends—I think she was working