“That’s great.”

“On the downside, it also means working five days a week for forty weeks a year, not just when some teacher gets sick or decides to move to I don’t know where.”

“Wichita?”

“It ties a person down, but would it keep us from doing anything we really wanted to do? What’s great is having the summers off, and if you ever want to get away from New Orleans, summer’s the time when you want to do it. I think I should tell them yes.”

“You mean you haven’t already?”

“Well, I wanted to discuss it with you. You think I should go for it?”

He did, and said so, and she served a dish she’d adapted from a New Orleans cookbook, a rich and savory stew of meat and okra served over rice, with a green salad, and lemon pie for dessert. The pie was from a little bakery on Magazine Street, and while he was tucking into a second piece she told him she’d bought him a present.

“I thought the pie was the present,” he said.

“It’s good, isn’t it? No, but this was also from Magazine Street, just two doors up from the bakery. I wonder if you ever noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

“The shop. I don’t know, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe you won’t like it, maybe it’ll just be a case of throwing salt in old wounds.”

“You know,” he said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Do I get a present or don’t I?”

“It’s not exactly a present. I mean, I didn’t wrap it. It’s not the kind of present you would wrap.”

“That’s good, because it’ll save the time it would take to unwrap it, and we can use that time having this conversation.”

“Am I being nuts? ‘Yes, Julia, you’re being nuts.’ Don’t go anywhere.”

“Where would I go?”

She came back with a flat paper bag, so in a sense the present was wrapped after all, if informally. “I just hope I didn’t do the wrong thing,” she said, handing it to him, and he reached into the bag and drew out a copy of Linn’s Stamp News.

“There’s this shop, it’s not much more than a hole in the wall. Stamps and coins and political campaign buttons. And other hobby items, but mostly those three. Do you know the shop I’m talking about?”

He didn’t.

“And I walked in, and I didn’t want to buy you stamps, because I thought that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea—”

“You were right about that.”

“But I saw this paper, and didn’t you mention it once? I think you did.”

“I may have.”

“You used to read it, didn’t you?”

“I was a subscriber.”

“And I thought should I get it for him or not? Because I know your stamps are gone, and how much they meant to you, and this might only make you feel the loss more. But then I thought maybe you’d enjoy reading the articles, and who knows, you might even want to, I don’t know, start another collection, although that might be impossible after having lost everything. Then I thought, oh, for God’s sake, Julia, give the little man two dollars and fifty cents and go home. So I did.”

“So you did.”

“Now if it was a really terrible idea,” she said, “just put it back in the bag it came in and hand it to me, and I’ll guarantee you never have to look at it again, and we can both pretend this never happened.”

“You’re wonderful,” he said. “Have I ever told you that?”

“You have, but we’ve always been upstairs. This is the first time you’ve told me on the ground floor.”

“Well, you are.”

“The present’s okay?”

“Yes, and the future’s promising.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. The present, this present, is more than okay. I don’t know if I’ll find the articles interesting, I don’t know if I’ll even want to look at the ads, much less do anything about them. But all of that is something I ought to find out.”

“I live another day,” she said. “Why don’t I pour you another cup of coffee, and why don’t you take Linn’s into the den?”

He looked at the front page and wondered why he was wasting his time. The lead article was about the high prices realized at an auction in Lucerne of an exceptional collection of stamps and postal history from Imperial Russia, before the 1917 revolution. Less prominent was coverage of the discovery of an error, a recent U.S. coil stamp with one color missing, and an article about reactions in the hobby to the post office’s announcement of new stamps planned for the coming year.

The same stories, he thought, week after week and year after year. The details changed, the numbers changed, but the more it all changed, the more it remained the same. He had to check the date of the paper to reassure himself it wasn’t an issue he’d already seen, months or years before.

The same dim-witted letters to the editor, too, the outpourings of the same self-involved malcontents, this one whining at the cost of keeping up with the huge crop of new issues, the next furious because the idiots at the post office insisted on ruining stamps on his mail by defacing them with heavy cancellations, and others joining in the endless debate on how to interest young boys and girls in the hobby. The only way you could do that, Keller figured, was to find a way to make philately more exciting than video games, and there was no way that would work, not even if you came out with a series of stamps that exploded.

Keller turned next to “Kitchen Table Philately,” which he’d heard was the paper’s most popular feature. This had always struck Keller as unfathomable, yet he had to admit he found it irresistible himself. Each week, one of two pseudonymous reviewers — interchangeable, as far as Keller could determine — analyzed in excruciating detail a mixture of stamps he’d bought for a small sum, often as little as a dollar, from a Linn’s advertiser. This week was typical, with Mr. Anonymous grumpy beyond belief because his two-buck assortment of stamps had taken a whole two weeks to reach his mailbox, and unhappy as well because fully 11 percent of the mixture’s contents were small definitive stamps rather than the large commemoratives promised. Christ, he thought, give it a rest, will you? If you can’t actually manage to get a life, can’t you at least pretend you’ve got one?

And then something curious happened. He read another article, and got caught up in what he was reading. The next thing he knew he was looking at one of the ads, a listing of Latin American issues offered by a worldwide dealer in Escondido with whom Keller had done business over the years. Like most listings, this one consisted of nothing but catalog numbers, indicators of condition, and prices, so it wasn’t really something a person could read, but Keller’s eyes were drawn to it, and from there he found his way to another ad, and after that he put down the paper and went upstairs for a minute. He came down with his Scott catalog and returned to the den, picked up Linn’s, and resumed where he’d left off.

“Nicholas?”

He looked up, yanked out of his reverie.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m going upstairs. You’ll turn off the lights when you come up?”

He closed the catalog, set the paper aside. “I’ll come up now.”

“If you’re having fun—”

“I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” he said. “And that’s all the fun I can stand for one night.”

He showered and brushed his teeth, and she was in bed waiting for him. They made love, and afterward he lay with his eyes open and said, “That was very sweet.”

“For me, too.”

“Well, just now, sure. I meant bringing me the paper. That was very thoughtful of you.”

“I’m just glad it turned out all right. I’m assuming that it did?”

“I got caught up in it,” he said. “But do you want to hear something really pathetic? I found an ad with what looked like some interesting material, and I actually went upstairs to get my catalog.”

“To check the value?”