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turned his attention to my purse. I held it open with an exaggerated sigh. He peered down into the bag and poked a hand in to rummage through the contents: wallet, keys, scraps of paper, change purse. After a quick minute he pulled his hand out, a black tube of lipstick held between his thumb and forefinger. It was sealed in clear plastic and had a wide white alarm strip wrapped around it.
    “You have a receipt for this?”
    I stared at him, shocked. “That’s not mine.”
    “I’m going to ask you to come with me, ma’am.” He put his hand on my arm to lead me toward the back of the store. I pulled my arm free.
    “Get your fucking hands off me!”
    The guard looked at Ed and me. “Do you want to tell me how this lipstick got in your purse?”
    “I have no idea,” I told him truthfully. “It must have fallen in. I was looking at it, but then I put it back. Seriously, I have no idea. Look—” I opened my wallet, which held a few hundred in twenties. “Do you think I would steal a four-dollar lipstick?”
    “It’s in your purse,” he said.
    “Listen,” said Ed. “We’ll pay for it. How’s that?”
    “But I don’t even want it!” I protested.
    Ed ignored me and looked at the guard, a come-on-we’re-all-men-here look. “I’ll pay for it.”
    After a dramatic pause the security guard nodded. He escorted us back to the cashier, where Ed paid for the lipstick, and then we left.
    Outside the store we looked at each other in astonishment, shaking our heads as we walked towards the Tibetan restaurant. I lit a cigarette and for once Ed didn’t scowl.
    “I can’t believe it,” I said. I really couldn’t. “I haven’t stolen anything since seventh grade.” When I was twelve and my stepmother said I was too young for makeup I went on a shoplifting spree, ending when I was caught red-handed with a contraband eyeliner.
    “Maybe he put it there,” said Ed. “Thought you wouldn’t put up a fuss.”
    “Why would he want to do that?”
    We were silent for a moment, contemplating the possible motivations of a rogue security guard.
    Ed shrugged. “It must have fallen, like you said.”
    “Yeah. I guess when I put it back in the dispenser it fell back out.”
    “It must have.”
    “Must have.”
    “Yeah. It must have.”
    First Ed burst out laughing, then me. Almost arrested in the drugstore, over a four-dollar lipstick I hadn’t even wanted! We told the story again and again to friends and coworkers, and even to Ed’s mother, over the phone. It was too funny. Hysterical. And even funnier was that at the end I was glad to have the lipstick; it was a dark, brick red that I never would have bought, far from my usual neutral, pinkish brown, but for the rest of that summer and fall I wore the red lipstick almost every day and when it ran out, in mid-November, I went back to the same drugstore and stole another tube.

 
    L EAVING WORK A FEW days later I walked by a hole-in-the-wall bar between my office and the train. I had walked by it a hundred times before without a second thought. Suddenly I wanted a drink. One drink, I thought. Just one. It had been years since I stopped into a bar, alone, for a drink. I stood in front of the door. It looked filthy inside. One drink, I thought. Just one quick drink.
    An hour later I was on my third tequila, sitting at the bar with a man whose name I had instantly forgotten when he introduced himself to me. He was about my age, with short, scruffy black hair and an appealing, slightly wrinkled face. His arms were wrapped in tattoos; Japanese goldfish with bulging eyes and a mermaid with a sweet face and waves and waves of water in between. This was the kind of man I liked in my early twenties, before I met Ed.
    “How about four,” the bartender said. I nodded. The man I was sitting with smiled. He had a once-in-a-lifetime smile. The bartender gave us two more drinks.
    I looked around the room. Mostly men, mostly tattooed like my drinking companion. A band was setting