Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg




When I was growing up, my mother’s best friend was a woman named Cosmina Mandruleanu. I liked her for a lot of reasons: her name, of course; her ash-blond hair and throaty voice and loud laugh; her bangle bracelets and black nylons and the way she was generous with the Juicy Fruit gum she always kept in her purse. She was someone who made smoking seem alluring; if she looked at you in that sidelong way when she exhaled, you felt as though you were sharing a risqué secret. She told me her grandmother was a Romanian gypsy who had passed on to her the Gift: Cosmina could tell fortunes. Mostly she used tea leaves, but she also read palms or used a crystal ball or her grandmother’s ancient Tarot cards. She said her gifts were in her mind, that she could use anything, even a pair of pliers, as a catalyst for accessing her powers. But people liked the traditional props, and so she accommodated them. She once told my mother that she, too, was a bit psychic, which made my mother fluff up with pride and say, “You know, I thought so.” When I asked Cosmina if she thought I had the Gift as well, she looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “You are a good student of human nature. That’s a start.”

Cosmina once volunteered to tell fortunes at my junior high school’s annual fund-raiser, so that the adults would have something to do besides drink weak coffee and watch Dunk the Principal. She sat in a corner of the gymnasium behind a TV tray on which she had draped a black cloth, and she wore a long black skirt and a black blouse over which she had a fringed red shawl. She’d knotted a black scarf at the base of her neck to cover her bright hair, and her makeup was more dramatic than usual: thick lines of kohl were drawn around her eyes. I offered her a dollar to have my own fortune read. She refused at first; she said she read adults only, it wasn’t right to read children, especially children of your friends. Finally, though, she relented. I stood before her in my pedal pushers and sleeveless blouse, my breath caught in my throat. She laid her hands on her crystal ball and closed her eyes. Then she peered into it. After a moment, she said, “Your task will be to learn in what direction to look for life’s great riches, and not to deny the veracity of your own vision.”

I stared at her, then whispered, “What does ‘veracity’ mean?”

She leaned forward and whispered back, “Truth.”

When I got outside, I wrote Cosmina’s words on the back of a flyer. That night, I read them again, then put the paper in a handmade wooden box I’d been given by my grandfather. It was large, about twelve by twenty, and four inches deep, made of black ash; and it had box-joint corners of which the maker was justifiably proud. He’d woodburned Japanese chrysanthemums into the lid, and they were beautiful—spidery and reaching, botanical fireworks. I’d wanted to save the box to use for something important. Here it was.





MY BEST FRIEND PENNY’S GRAVE HAS A SIMPLE HEADSTONE, light gray granite inscribed with her name, the date of her birth, and the date of her death, which was four months ago. Below that, as agreed, are these words: Say it. Penny believed that people didn’t often enough admit to what they really felt, and she thought that made for a lot of problems. Being close to her meant that you had to attempt unstinting honesty, at least in your dealings with her. Her husband, Brice, could get annoyed about this, and so could I—a lack of deceit requires a kind of internal surveillance that can feel like work, and there are, after all, times when a lie serves a noble purpose. But overall, I think both he and I understood the value of such candor, and appreciated Penny’s efforts to steer us toward it. And then there was this: we wanted to please her because we both loved her so much. Loved and needed her.

And here she is.

I lean back on my hands and look out over the acres of graves. I used to feel that cemeteries were wasted space, that they could be put to far better use as parks, or golf courses, or even to allow for more living space. But I’ve changed my mind. There is a wide peace here, even in sorrow; and it’s sitting beside Penny’s grave that I can best feel her.

“Going to Atlanta tomorrow,” I tell her.

Good gig?

“It is good. Early flight, though. You know I hate those early flights.”

Stop whining.

“Your sweet peas are blossoming,” I say. I planted some recently, at the base of her headstone.

I know. I see. Pink.

“Where are you?”

Silence.

“Penny?”

She’s gone.

She always leaves when I ask that question; I don’t know why I keep asking it. Well, yes I do. I keep asking it because I keep wanting to know where she is.

I sit for a while longer, appreciating the feel of the sun on my back, the sound of the mockingbird in the tree nearby imitating the whistle of a cardinal. A few rows away, I see an old man sitting on a fold-up chair, his hat in his hands, his head bowed. I can see his lips moving. It might be prayer. Or he might be like me: he might be having a conversation. Out here, there are a lot of people like me. We don’t often speak to each other, but I think it’s safe to say we gratefully acknowledge each other’s presence, that little mercy.





THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I’M AT THE OSHAKA WOMEN’S CLUB IN Atlanta, where I’ve been hired to give a talk. I’m standing at the window in the speaker’s room and looking through the slanted blinds at the women gathered on the lawn, chatting amiably, laughing, leaning their heads together to share a certain confidence. They’re pretty; they look like so many butter mints, dressed in pastel greens and pinks and yellows and whites. It’s a warm spring day after a rainy night, and the women who are wearing high heels are having trouble with them sinking into the earth.

I sit down on the silk love seat to review my notes, but I don’t have to: I’ve delivered this speech called “You.2: Creating a Better Version of Yourself” so many times, in so many places, that I’ve pretty much memorized it. But looking at my notes gives me something to do besides stare at the flowered wallpaper, the Oriental rug, the gold-and-crystal sconce lighting, which I’ve already examined thoroughly. It also keeps me from what has become a persistent sadness; it’s taking me a while to get over Penny’s death. The last thing a motivational speaker needs is to appear low on energy, mired in despair.

This organization likes you to be there early, and they keep you in the speaker’s room until you go on; they feel it’s more exciting to their audience if they see you for the first time when you come onstage, smiling, waving, dressed in your power suit—in this case, a white St. John skirt and jacket, offset by a turquoise necklace and earrings.

A fifty-something woman wearing a yellow apron over a print dress comes into the room holding a little gold-rimmed plate full of food: tea sandwiches, cut-up melon, cookies. “I’m just helping out in the kitchen before your talk,” she says. “I have to tell you, I am really looking forward to hearing you speak. I hope you won’t mind my telling you this, but you said something in your last book that truly helped change my life: Getting lost is the only way to find what you didn’t know you were looking for. It is so true. It helped me to flat out leave a man who was just a son of a bitch, plain and simple. It took a real leap of faith to do what you said. I did have to get kind of lost—to abandon certain ways of thinking, of being, really—and it was scary. But doing that gave me the courage to walk away from someone I should have left a long time ago. And six months later, I found someone else who is much better for me. I’m so happy to thank you in person for helping me to do that.”

She looks at her watch, unties her apron. “Oh my, I didn’t mean to run on. I’d better get a seat.”

She goes out of the room and I check my makeup one more time, straighten my suit jacket, and here comes Darlene Simmons, the club’s president, to escort me onto the stage.

When we come out from behind the curtain, the room immediately quiets. I sit in one of the two wingback chairs onstage, and Darlene goes up to the lectern and does the introduction. Then I go up and begin my talk.

Forty minutes later, I end by saying, “When I was a junior in high school, I was sitting in my world history class when the teacher suddenly asked this question: ‘What is truth?’ There was a long silence, we all just sat there, and then finally Janet Gilmore, the smartest girl in the class—and also, unfairly, the prettiest—raised her hand and she said, ‘Truth is what you believe.’ Mr. Sanders nodded approvingly. I was thinking, What does this have to do with history? But of course it has everything to do with history, because history is shaped by the belief systems of those who made it.

“Our own individual life history is also shaped that way. In large part, when you factor out fate, what we are is because of what we believe about ourselves. Wherever we are in the world, we mostly live in the small space between our ears.

“I challenge you to acknowledge and affirm your innermost beliefs: bring them into the light. When you know what the truth is for you, you can help create not only your history, but your destiny.”

I thank the audience, then step from behind the lectern to applaud them. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that many women are inspired, but some who walked in here cynical are walking out the same way. In some respects, I’m among them. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as a motivational speaker, it’s that most people need someone else to tell them what they already know. I include myself in this. I include myself most keenly. That, in fact, is how I start my talks: I say I am forever a physician in the act of healing myself, that to be human is to live in wonder and in need, and in perpetual evolution. I say that no matter what our occupation, our real job is to help each other out. Penny was the one who helped me. It kills me to use the past tense when I talk about her. It frightens me to think that there may never be anyone who can take her place.

Times when we were stumped and unable to advise each other about problems, we used to go out on my porch at night with my grandfather’s box. We would light candles and hunch over a table and inquire of the oracle. In addition to Cosmina’s fortune, which I wrote out all those years ago, the box holds a lot of different things for playing medium: cards, books, stones.

Penny and I asked about relationships, about work, about friends and relatives, and occasionally about politicians. We asked if the end of the world was nigh; we asked if the Twins would win the series. We were often playful but just as often we were deeply respectful. It was eerie how “on” the answers sometimes were, how using two or even three different methods for posing the same question could yield the same answer. I think on more than one occasion we kind of scared ourselves.

And then there was the time after Penny was first diagnosed, when I did the cards alone. I sat at my kitchen table and closed my eyes and simply thought, Penny. I was too afraid to ask a specific question. But the question was heard anyway, because I pulled the death card. I reshuffled the deck once, twice, and made a new spread. Pulled a card. Got the same thing.

I laid my head down on my arms and wept. Since that day, I, the motivational speaker, have not been able to motivate myself into making a new life without her.





“I’LL STOP SOON,” I USED TO TELL PENNY, WHO IN RECENT YEARS had begun advising me to quit working or at least cut down enough so that we could travel together. It was a dream of ours to go to Japan; I think Penny bought every book published about traveling there. We also wanted to take a leisurely driving trip across the southern states. Brice didn’t like to travel and was all in favor of Penny “getting it out of her system” with me. I had never married, and though I almost always had a relationship, sometimes a serious one, I never thought any of those men would be as much fun to travel with as Penny would be. We were passionate about many of the same things: small towns, vintage quilts, unique breakfast places, cobalt-blue glassware, spontaneous conversations with all kinds of people in all kinds of places. Penny was the kind of person who could go into a convenience store for a Coke and come out soul mates with the cashier.

We also seemed to operate on the same kind of schedule; it was a happy day when we admitted to each other that we loved taking the phone off the hook and napping in the mid-afternoons. “Do you sleep more than twenty minutes?” I asked. I felt a little guilty that my naps lasted thirty or even forty-five minutes. “I have gone for two hours!” she said, and I high-fived her.

We planned on alternating extravagant hotels with cheap motels on our road trip. “Maybe we’ll find a crumbly old pink one!” Penny said. “With one of those pools the size of a puddle!” It was our belief that tacky motels would be much more interesting, even if the beds gave pause. We wanted to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and take donkeys down into the Grand Canyon. We wanted to feel the power of the vortexes in Sedona, Arizona, and to buy some crystals there. Oh, we had plans. So many plans that I kept putting off.

“But when will you stop?” she would ask, year after year, and I would say, “Something will tell me when.” Once, exasperated, she said, “You act like there’s all the time in the world, and there isn’t!” To this I had no reply.

That Penny and Brice Mueller lived right next door to me was a gift of immeasurable proportion. I used to go into their house as though it were my own. We watched television a couple of nights a week and we often made dinners and ate together. Every Sunday, we used my living room to read the papers while we ate caramel rolls from Keys Café; the three of us were almost roommates. I used to tell them that they, more than anyone else I had ever met, supported my theory that people are attracted to those who look like themselves. Brice and Penny were both very tall, with strawberry-blond hair, wide eyes, freckled arms and legs. Even the shape of their noses was similar. Where they differed was in their personalities: Penny was always up for almost anything; Brice was far more cautious. Penny was an optimist, too, sometimes outright irritating in her consistently bright outlook; Brice had his moods. But they were good together; they loved each other, and they were so much fun to be around.

When Brice’s birthday was coming up, I hid his presents in my bedroom closet. I hid Penny’s in the furnace room; she was in my closet too often for me to risk putting anything there. There were times when I was at their house late at night and moaned about being too tired to walk across the lawn to my own house. They would invite me to stay and I would always say that was ridiculous and rally myself to make the short trip. But I think if I’d ever said, “Oh hell, why don’t I just move in?” they would have looked at each other, shrugged, and said, “Sure!”

Eight months ago, Penny was diagnosed with a fast-moving cancer; she died four months later. Brice stayed in the house for another month. Then he came over one night with a bottle of wine and told me he knew he wasn’t supposed to make any rash moves, everyone had told him that, including me, but the hell with it, he was going to move back to New York. He said he couldn’t stand being in the house—or the city, or the state, or the Midwest—without her. When we had finished the bottle, he said, “You know, Penny told me that when she died, I should marry you.”

I smiled. “I know. She told me the same thing, that I should marry you. So what did you say, when she told you that?”

“What did you say?” Brice asked.

“Okay. Let’s both answer on three. One … two …”

On three, we both said, “Naaaah.”

“Not that I don’t love you,” Brice said, quickly.

“Or I you.”

“But …” he said.

“But,” I agreed.

He got up and stood looking out onto the street for a while, his hands on his hips like a quarterback. Then he turned and said, “Well.”

“Take care of yourself, B,” I said, and I watched him walk back to his house—their house—his head hung low.

A moving van pulled away from that house two weeks later, and a week after that another moving van pulled up to it. A young family lives next door now, very nice, two little boys, six and eight. They’re wonderful children, polite and charming and oftentimes funny, but for me the whole family is like being offered a sumptuous dinner when you’ve no appetite at all.

Lately, I’ve been thinking I need to move, too. When? I ask myself sometimes, and I answer in the same way I answered Penny: something will tell me when.

Well, maybe that has just happened: maybe something is telling me that now is the time. Getting off the plane on my way home from making the speech in Atlanta, I have one of those moments that feels like life backing up to you without the warning beeps, and then hitting you smack in the middle of your chest. I realize what it is: I don’t want to go home. Not to that house, not to that street. The thought of pulling into the driveway, sliding the key into the lock, offers not the comfort of familiarity but the ache of abandonment.

On the plane, I sat next to a man with whom I had a great deal in common. We both liked anchovies and we were born in the same month in the same year. We liked Little League baseball, we loved dogs but traveled too much to have one. Our hair was the same salt-and-pepper color. The most salient thing we had in common was that we both had jobs motivating people. But whereas I wrote self-help books and gave talks, he was a psychologist who flew around the country to various businesses, doing team building with employees. He enjoyed his work, and he had been remarkably successful. He told me that at one time he had owned four homes, including an apartment in Paris. Now, though, he was coming back from having done his last job. He was quitting the business, and he and his wife were going to live in the one place he had left—he’d sold all the others. They were going to live in a small cabin, located on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota, near the Boundary Waters.

“Retiring, huh?” I said.

He looked over at me. “I don’t call it that. I guess I don’t even think of it like that. I see where all this success has led me. Now I want to see what it’s kept me from.”

“Huh,” I said. And then I asked him, “Are you at all scared?”

He tossed some peanuts into his mouth, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Terrified.”

We both laughed, but then he said, “I also haven’t felt this alive in years.”

I sit in one of the empty gate areas to call a cab. When the dispatcher asks where I’m going and I give him my address, my gut begins to ache. Well, I’ve said it often enough to others: there are times when you have to hurt badly in order to move. Otherwise, you’ll stay in a place you’ve outgrown.

When I get out to the curb, the cab is there. The driver stashes my bag in the trunk, and I think he looks angry. Sure enough, as we pull away from the curb, he catches my eyes in the rearview and in an accent I can’t quite identify yells, “You know what? I’ll tell you something: People are rude!”

“They certainly can be,” I say.

“For one hour, I been waiting for a man who say he’s coming right out, that’s what he tell the starter, ‘No, I have no baggage; I am coming out now.’ One hour I wait, he doesn’t come. Then the starter tell me, ‘He went to baggage claim; he’s coming now.’

“I say, ‘No.’ I say, ‘I’m not take him.’ Instead, I take you.”

From the radio, I hear the faint strains of “September in the Rain.”

“Is that Dinah Washington?” I ask, leaning forward.

The man, whose name is Khaled, has settled down somewhat; he readjusts his shoulders and increases the volume slightly.

“Yes, Dinah Washington, I have to listen to her because she make me calm down from the rude people.”

I lean back in the seat, cross my arms, and stare out the window. “I wish there was a place where you could sit at a little table and still listen to songs like that,” I say. “You know. White tablecloth, little lamp lit low, Rob Roys and Brandy Alexanders.”

“Those places are all gone, now.”

“I know they are.”

We fall silent until we pull up in front of my house. Then Khaled says, “I tell you what. You hire me and I drive you around and all we do, we listen to old songs. For many hours!”

I laugh. “Don’t tempt me.”

I bring my bags in, then collect the mail and start sorting through it. For one moment, I think about calling Khaled back. But I don’t. I hope it is not to my everlasting regret. I’m always telling everyone else to take advantage of spontaneous gifts that come along, often when you least expect them. In fact, that idea inspired one of my books, the one that emphasizes the worth of going out into the world and gathering up all the beautiful things that are given to you, if only you will ask.

I am just about to toss all the mail in the trash when what I think is a postcard falls out of a circular. But it’s not a postcard. Rather, it’s an old black-and-white photograph made to serve as a postcard, of what looks to be Tahiti: there in the background is the endless sea, the rise of low mountains, wisps of clouds. In the foreground, off to the side, is a black-haired native woman with an unsettlingly direct gaze. I have never seen the image, yet it is familiar to me.

On the back of the card, I see lines of black ink from a fountain pen, written in a clear, flowing hand that I recognize instantly. The message is brief, only three lines:

I still think of you.

How are you?

Tell me.

There is a return address, no name, but I don’t need one. From both the image and the handwriting, I know who sent this photo: Dennis Halsinger. He is an artist I once loved, who left Minnesota for Tahiti many years ago. His name is such a long story.

Well. Speaking of everlasting regret.

Once I was riding a bus, sitting behind two women who were maybe in their late fifties. They were engrossed in a conversation I couldn’t hear much of; they kept their voices low and decorous. But at one point, one of the women sighed and leaned her head against the bus window, and said, “Ah, you know. My one and only yous.”

Her friend laughed. “It’s my one and only you.”

The other woman said, “No it isn’t.”

I think it’s true for a lot of people, that we have a few shining relationships in our lives, with people we hold forever in our hearts. It also seems, though, that there’s usually one who mattered most. For me, that was Dennis Halsinger. He was the one apart, the one I loved best, and truest, and the one I felt most loved by. I loved him for the way he was and for who I was when I was with him. He lived honestly, consciously, in ways both macro and micro, and I admired this. Morning, noon, middle of the night: when you looked into his eyes, the sign was flipped to the Open side. I could tell him anything, and did. We fit together in much the same easy way that Penny and I did. It was rare enough for me to have that ease and joy and depth in a friendship with a woman; to have the same level of comfort with a man was something I had never experienced before, nor have I since. Even in my most successful relationships after Dennis, there was only so far I could go. Or would go, perhaps.

When Dennis and I were both still in our early twenties, he left, he went off on a voyage to South America, and later to Tahiti, to live. We’d planned on my joining him there. But in the end I lacked the courage to break away like that. It had all seemed so easy when I agreed to it, but then there was the matter of getting the money for the plane ticket, of deciding what to take and what not to. Would they have Herbal Essences shampoo there? Good movies and record stores? What if I got appendicitis? Would I in fact miss the country I spent so much time maligning? In the end, I decided to pass on the idea. For the moment! I told myself. I believed, in youth’s way, that such opportunities would always be there. Such men, too, I suppose.

Anyway, gradually, Dennis and I lost touch. And then we died, is how I now realize I thought of it. Or maybe it was just a part of me that died, when I didn’t go with him.

But now. Here he is, on a card in my hand. Dennis Halsinger!

I don’t even bother to change out of my suit. I go directly to the little desk in the bedroom and take out stationery. Images of Dennis from the time we were together are tumbling around in my brain, falling over themselves for prime placement: his long blond hair, his face so handsomely chiseled I used to tell him he should model for Prince Valiant in the comics. I see us walking in a field with chest-high grass that moved in the wind like water, and where the birdsong was so loud it made us laugh—we had to shout to be heard above it. I remember us driving down the freeway on a hot August night, looking for a place far from city lights where we could lie down and look at the stars, and the place we found presented constellations to us with a clarity that rendered us speechless.

Dennis used to give books to me, battered paperbacks he had read and reread into buttery softness: Siddhartha, The Magic Mountain, Fear and Trembling. He said I’d learn more from them than from my psychology textbooks, and he was right. He gave me the I Ching, the edition with the foreword by Carl Jung, and we did our fist toss using pennies on the sidewalk in front of his house.

In addition to photography, Dennis did painting and sculpture, and I remember him up on a ladder barefoot and shirtless, his jeans barely hanging on to his slim hips, welding something onto a high, free-form tower he had made—he did at least wear a welder’s mask. I remember his hand guiding mine as he showed me how to draw a peony as big as a dinner plate. Feeding me the seeds of a pomegranate, one by one. The time we jumped in the Mississippi to go swimming and, afterward, came back to my place to dry off. We sat at the tiny kitchen table wrapped in towels and then he stood and dropped his towel and said, “This is the way I was born.” I stood and my towel dropped, too, and I went to him and he carried me to my bed. That was my first time; he was the first, and I’ve always been glad of that.

I begin writing:

Dear Dennis,

A few months ago, I started a letter to you. But there was too much to say. It was a time when I had just lost my best friend, and I was casting about for what to do with myself, needing to remember that life is mostly rich and beautiful and ever there for the taking. And if there was anyone who could remind me of that, it was you. But I wrote a few lines, and stopped.

Then, today, I got your postcard. And your photograph, wonderful as always.

Dennis used to take photos of ordinary people, beautiful images that you wanted to stare and stare at, that your eye roved over and kept finding things in. He took pictures in a casual, off-the-cuff kind of way, and I never understood how he was able to find the precise moment to snap the shutter. By showing a half smile, a finger to the corner of the eye, an unbandaged cut on a hand, he could reveal so much about a person. Sometimes it wasn’t the people themselves; it was their houses, or their cars, or their four dogs. It was random things that belonged to them—a tin of buttons. Brass knuckles in a bedside drawer. A cookbook open to a page with so many stains it looked like a Rorschach test.

Looking at Dennis’s photos showed me that photography was not only visual record keeping but a legitimate form of art. Not only did I see that a person’s soul could be captured (the Native Americans were right to fear the lens), but I saw how shadow and light affect the image. And I saw what Dennis meant when he said that photography is a process of elimination.

He once showed me a collection of photographs he’d taken of waitresses when he drove his motorcycle from Minnesota to California. You could see all the different uniforms, the white shoes, the variety of earrings, one lovely locket on a long chain. I remember a shot where a waitress had six plates lined up on her arm, while another sat in a booth, on break, looking out the window. Her legs were crossed, and her arms were wrapped tightly around herself. She had a plateful of food before her, but she stared out at the rain.

Dennis photographed waitresses with hair fashioned into falling-down ponytails or sprayed-up beehives or neat little short dos, some of which were festooned with bows or barrettes; it’s astonishing to me how clearly I recall those images, now. You could see such weariness in the set of shoulders. You could see blatant invitation in the thrusting forward of breasts. You could see a handkerchief pinned above a pocket, an emphatic smear of eye shadow, a run in a nylon, a thin arm that reached for a pile of coins left beneath a tabletop jukebox.

I write:

I have books of photography by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, because their work reminds me of you. One of Evans’s images I’ve been looking at lately is of a grave situated at the edge of a field that stretches far out, row after row of tilled earth, five telephone poles running alongside. And it was the telephone wires that got me. Life going on above, chatter along the lines; below … who knew?

I had an abstract fear of death when I was young. These days, it is not so abstract, but then it is not so much a fear anymore, either. You used to say, “When it’s time to come in, it’s time to come in, that’s all.” And I remember you quite naturally subscribed to the idea of communication after death, something I have never believed in more than now.

You ask how I am. Well enough, is the short answer. The world is more complex than I once believed; people are, too. I write books that I hope will help people with various problems in their lives, and I give a lot of talks all over the country, and occasionally abroad. Hearing from you has made me realize something: oftentimes, when I give talks, I’m sharing knowledge I gained from being with you. And I’m trying to motivate people in the same way that you tried to motivate me: to be awake, to stay true, to evolve. The friend I just lost was like you in that way, too: you would have liked each other, I think.

Are you married? I’m not. Whether you are or not, I am excited at the prospect of having you, however tangentially, in my life again.

Why are you in Cleveland? Now that you are closer, I’d like to come and visit you there. Or perhaps you would like to come here?

Dennis Halsinger. I think it is not much of an exaggeration to say that I remember everything.

Yours,

Cece

I add a P.S. with my cellphone number, then put the pen down and stare at the letter. What can this mean, this great excitement, this overwhelming desire to see him? I suppose that for one thing, it means I need someone I can talk to, talk to really. This is the first time since Penny died that I’ve wanted to. “Okay, Penny,” I say. “When is now. I’m going to make a move.”

It’s about time.

“I wish you’d known him,” I tell her.

Oh I know him, now.