"An expertly compressed, post-modern historical novella set over the course of a single, unseasonably warm day in November of 1957. Kathleen, a standout college tennis player, mother of two boys and wife to flagrantly handsome, aimless life insurance salesman, Virgil, decides to get into the pool in their Delaware apartment complex instead of going to church. And she won't come out. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying that poor little doomed Soviet space dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle toward each other, and toward a reckoning that will either shatter the smooth edifice of their marriage or transform it, at last, into something real"--