“One night three years ago, very late, I got a call. A woman asked for me two times. She was so upset that I had to convince her who I was. She said she knew I was a good friend of James’s and wanted me to know he’d been killed in a car accident.

“He’d been in New York and gotten a call from his girlfriend in Philadelphia. She wanted to break up with him because she’d met someone else. Apparently she was that cold—wanted out and there was nothing more to talk about.

“As soon as he got off the phone, James jumped in his car and drove straight down there. It was very icy and the roads were bad. He made it to Philadelphia but was driving too fast. When he tried to get off the turnpike, the car skidded and went off the road. She said he died instantly.”

“Instantly?”

“That’s what the woman said.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t give a name, even when I asked. I bet it was the girlfriend.

“He asked about you, Miranda. When we had coffee, he asked if I had heard anything about you.”

My heart lurched. “Really?”

“Yes. He was disappointed when I didn’t know.”

We were silent while music from the reunion filled the air around us.

“Is there anything else?”

“No. I told you I asked the woman for her name but she wouldn’t say. She hung up right after that.”

Zoe sighed and looked at the ground. It was such a final, nothing-left sigh.

“Thank you, Diana. It makes it clearer.”

We hugged. She stepped back, hands on my elbows, and looked at me a moment more. Then she turned and started for the building.

“Diana?”

“Yes?”

“Really, he was happy?”

She only nodded. Which was better than any words. It allowed me my own vocabulary for his happiness.

“Thank you.”

She reached into her handbag, took out a card, and handed it to me. “Call if you want to talk, or if you’re ever in Kalamazoo, Michigan.”

Zoe and I stood in silence in the middle of the lawn. After time had passed I said, “I don’t want to go back in there. I’ll call a cab. Could you give me a key to your house?”

“Let’s go someplace and drink a lot.”

Instead we ended up driving around again. Past the same places we’d seen that afternoon, which now felt like a million years ago. I turned on the radio and, as if they knew our mood, all the stations seemed to be playing only songs we’d loved when we were young. Which was all right because we finished being young that night and it was right to be immersed in it one last time.

I hadn’t been paying attention to where she was going, and realized where we were only when she slowed and turned into the parking lot of the Carvel ice cream stand.

“Good idea!”

“If we’re not going to get drunk, we’ll get fat.”

We ordered the old usual—vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate—and went back to her car. In our party dresses we sat on the hood and ate.

“They’re still delicious.”

“I haven’t had one in years. I used to bring the kids when they were young, but they wouldn’t be caught dead with me in public these days.”

We watched people come and go. Back at the country club, our classmates were dancing and reliving happy times. But Kevin was back there too and so was James.

“Zoe, what do we do now?”

“Hope, honey. Same thing as I said before.”

“Not much hope in Mudville tonight.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I found Andy’s gun?”

That stopped me. “You’re kidding! Andy, your slimy ex-husband?”

“Yup. It was the first year we were married. I was putting away clean underwear in his drawer. Sitting on top of his Fruit Of The Looms was a gun.”

“Why’d he have it?”

“The most interesting thing was, the moment I found it, the only thing that went through my mind wasn’t ‘He’s got a gun!’ What hit me was, ‘The world is an amazing place.’ You know how it is when you’re first with someone and love him: you think you know everything about him. Then you open a drawer one day and there’s something—an old love letter, a diary, a gun. It’s impossible to connect with the person you thought you knew.

“It was kind of wonderful, Miranda. I knew no matter what happened, life was always going to be interesting.”

“Because you found a gun?”

“No! Because it was part of Andy too. I really didn’t know him and that excited me. There were all these new things to discover. In the end we divorced, but back then, life was still opening up. It excited me. It still excites me. You should let it do that. You should let that happen.”

3. A Yogurt Trilogy

“You’re a thief, Miranda.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jaco.”

Sniffing the air as if something stunk in the room, he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Perhaps the most unscrupulous I have ever done business with.”

I tapped my front tooth with a fingernail. “Jaco, we’ve had this conversation before. You always say the same thing: I’m a crook, a bitch… always the same spring rolls. But I find the books you want. You wanted a signed first edition of The Gallery; I got it for you. You wanted a letter from Eliot, I found it for you—”

“True, but then you charge so much that I have no money left!”

“You’d have to live another four hundred years before you ran out of money. Don’t buy it! You know Dagmar will if you don’t.” It was a rotten thing to say, but I was so disgusted with him at the moment I couldn’t resist.

As usual, her detested name straightened his back and narrowed his greedy eyes.

Dagmar Breece. Jaco Breece’s nemesis. All I had to do was wave her name in front of him and the mean old man started snorting like Ferdinand the Bull.

Dagmar and Jaco Breece had two passions: cashmere and twentieth-century authors. That was great when they were married and ran a sweater company together for four decades. The business was successful, they had a couple of nice children who grew up and away, they shared a passion for collecting. Then when she was sixty years old, Dagmar fell in love with another man and promptly moved out on her husband. Good riddance.

What galled Jaco more than losing her, however, was her saying he could keep the rare book and manuscript collection they’d spent years amassing. She would start another with the help of her rich new boyfriend.

That’s how I came to know them. Several years before, when they were still together, Dagmar came into the store and bought an Edward Dahlberg manuscript I had listed in a catalog. After that, I found a number of things for them, both when they were married and after she left. I liked Dagmar but not Jaco. Not one bit.

Standing there watching him fume, I wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known I was going to a dinner party at her apartment that night.

“What else do you have that’s new?”

“Some Rilke letters—”

“Everyone has Rilke letters. He wrote too many.”

“Jaco, you asked what’s new. I have some letters—Noooo, wait! I have something else that’ll interest you!”

My store is small, so it was only three steps to the sideboard. I disliked the whole pompous leather-and-dark-oak look of most rare book dealers’ stores, so mine was furnished with 1950s Heywood Wakefield blond wood furniture and a very warm red-and-white Chinese rug. Together they made the room light, slightly odd, and, I hoped, welcoming. I loved books and everything about them. I wanted customers to know that when they walked in.

The difference between my business and the business of other book and manuscript dealers was that I sold anything else I fancied too.

Opening a drawer, I took out the long thin case made of crocodile skin. It looked like the kind Victorian gentlemen used for carrying cigars. What I had inside was much better than that. Opening it, I put it down on the counter in front of Jaco, knowing he would go into cardiac arrest when he realized what it was.