She placed a ball on a one-inch plastic tube, a substitute tee, on the plastic grass pad. She then overswung three times, missing the ball completely. Remember not to muscle the ball, her mother’s ex-boyfriend had said. Don’t force it. Just use the laws of nature and gravity. Ann relaxed and slowed down. Soon she was in a groove and the ball was sailing past the hundred-foot marker.

“Hey, lady, you want more balls?” asked a teenager who was collecting the empty metal buckets at some point.

Ann looked down and saw her bucket was empty. How long had she been taking swings without the ball?

“It works better with balls, you know.”

After the sun went down, Ann decided to return to the massage waiting room. The wooden box was unlocked and the desk clerk was slitting open the tip envelopes with a knife. On top of the reception table were neat stacks of twentydollar bills.

“We closed,” the clerk said, finally noticing Ann. She smiled as if she knew of an inside joke. Her magenta lipstick looked freshly applied.

Ann couldn’t imagine why the clerk needed to looked well-groomed to count money. She figured the clerk must be a higher-up, maybe a manager. “You know that’s their money, not yours.”

“We pay them tomorrow. They will get their money, I assure you.”

Once Ann returned to the apartment, she ate a bowl of tomato soup she had bought from the 99 cents store. It was a brand she had never heard of; the soup, which had the consistency of silt, was a strange crayon orange color. Marie had been right-business had slowed down considerably and now people were leaving their spare change instead of dollar bills for tips. Ann looked for Marie’s cell phone number in her purse and dialed it. A man answered the phone.