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“Well, I have a better chance of understanding you when you don’t say anything at all,” the woman said when Henry sat down
again. “How long have you been married, Henry?”

The question startled him. He stared down at his feet planted on the smooth, newly laid walkway. For his last birthday, his
wife had to remind him that he was turning fifty-three, not fifty-two as he had thought. Sometimes he caught himself drifting
only to be seized with panic that he no longer knew where he was. The years had passed by as in a dream, and he suddenly found
himself sitting on this bench, speaking to a woman he didn’t know, as he tried to remember his life.

“Twenty-two,” he finally answered.

“Impressive,” the woman remarked. “Ronny and I didn’t last half that long. Love can turn ugly so fast. The simplest things
about him made me go crazy. Like at night, when Ronny brushed his teeth, he used this curved metal thing to scrape his tongue.
He liked showing me all the gunk it collected and tried to persuade me to use it. Whenever we went out to eat, he’d inspect
his glass. If there was the slightest water spot, he’d wipe it down with a napkin.” The woman sighed. “It’s the stupid, small
things that make you hate someone. We parted ways, and then last summer a neighbor found Ronny. I never thought he would be
capable of doing that. He didn’t leave a note, just a piece of paper calculating how much he would have to fall. He was a
hundred eighty-nine pounds, and he worked it out that he would have to fall eight feet and two inches.” The woman scratched
her elbow.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, folding her hands over her stomach. “The doctors ask me all the time. Do you know
what’s going to happen to you if you don’t stop? they say. Seizures. Coma. I don’t know whether to believe them or not. I
have such a terrible thirst.” The woman paused to gaze at Henry. “You don’t think my body would be steering me wrong, do you?”

The skin along the woman’s face sagged once she stopped talking. Henry wondered what it would mean to be like her, smoking
her cigarettes, taking her pills, drinking her water. He had never been addicted to anything in his life. He imagined her
arranging glasses of water neatly in a row. She would pick up a glass and begin to drink, and when it was empty she would
pick up another, letting the liquid pour down her throat, filling the folds of her stomach. She was trying to drown something
inside of her, but Henry didn’t think it could be done.

“It’s the moments of pettiness that you regret,” the woman said, “even though they reveal who you really are.”

When the nurse came to get him, he rose out of his seat.

“So long, Henry.” The woman smiled. She gave him her hand, brown and lithe, the nails bitten down to shapeless stubs. Her
skin had a soft dryness, and her fingers clutched his own with nervous energy. He turned and followed the nurse back inside.

After taking his vital signs—measuring his temperature and pulse, his blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation—after
taking his blood and submitting it to a laboratory for tests, after giving him a chest X-ray and then a CAT scan, hooking
him up to the cardiac monitor to follow the rhythms of his heart, it was determined that Henry had bronchitis. Henry laughed
at the news. It wasn’t too serious, the doctor said, prescribing for him the usual course of antibiotics as well as a cough
syrup with codeine to suppress the fits and relieve the pain. Henry’s family was sitting in the waiting room when he came
down the hallway. He had a bracelet around his wrist, and he was holding a white paper bag containing his medications.

“What’s up, Don?” his son said to him.

“How are you doing, Dad?” Alice asked.

Henry nodded his head and smiled. He’d taken his antibiotics and cough syrup already and felt like he was going to be better.
“You drive?” he asked his son.

“Sure,” James said.

“We saw a bear from the side of the road,” Alice told him.

Henry’s eyes widened. “A bear!”

“He had a white patch on his chest,” Alice said. “He stood up on his hind legs when he saw us.”

“Alice tried to take his picture,” James said, “but he ran into the forest when he saw her.”

“You kids.” He smiled, patting his son on the shoulder.

Outside, the mountains had become a mass of shadows darker than the sky. Henry felt them closing in as their tiny car pressed
forward along the highway. They stopped at a seafood restaurant a few miles from their motel. Henry wanted to eat for the
first time in several days and ordered two bowls of vegetable soup. Alice had brought her novel into the restaurant—she was
at a good part, she explained, and had only a couple of pages left in the chapter. She read diligently until the food came
and then placed her book facedown on the tablecloth.

Henry cleared his throat. “What kind of story?” he asked, pointing to the cover of his daughter’s book.

“Oh!” Alice exclaimed. “It’s hard to say.” She bit her lip, revealing her large opalescent teeth. “It’s about this young man
who’s innocent. Almost like a saint,” she said, touching the spine of her book thoughtfully. “He’s in love with a general’s
daughter, but there’s also this tortured, fallen woman. She’s beautiful and mad, all these men are in love with her, but she
doesn’t like any of them. One of them gives her a hundred thousand rubles, but she throws them into the fire.”

“Sounds like a stupid book,” James said.

“It’s not,” Alice said.

His wife cut off a piece of her salmon and put it onto Henry’s plate for him to try. Henry couldn’t help but notice the gentle
slope of her hands, her maternal fingers and clear, rounded nails. They had been at an ice-skating rink, he remembered, when
he first touched her hand. She had clung to the wall, wearing a bright yellow dress—a dress, even though they were skating!—but
he realized she had worn it for him, and as she tottered on her skates, he had taken her small cold fingers into his own.

His wife’s jade bracelet gleamed in the light as she turned her wrist. The waiter came and refilled their glasses of water.
Henry touched his glass, felt the beads of condensation along his fingertips. He thought of the woman at the hospital, imagined
her lying awake at this hour, trying to forget the dryness in her mouth. Perhaps she swallowed her own saliva for relief,
moistening her lips with her tongue. He lifted the glass to his mouth, his lips parted to receive its coolness.

Something clinked against his teeth. A pink mass floated up toward his lips.

“Dad, my water!” James laughed.

Henry saw a pink retainer sitting in the glass he was holding. His family erupted into laughter.

“I put it in there for a rinse,” James said.

“You know your father is getting confused,” his wife said.

“I didn’t see,” Alice laughed. “Did he really drink from it?”

People began looking over at their table. Henry flushed, realizing that he was still holding the glass of water in his hand.
He felt a painful throb in his chest, as if his heart were swollen, but he knew that it would be years before it finally gave
out. He could hear it beating louder and louder now as he set the glass on the table and waited for his family to quiet down.

I
n July, before the levees broke in New Orleans, my friend Kate and I had our palms read in Jackson Square. We arrived in the
city after a tropical storm. Thousands had lost electricity, and beautiful old trees had fallen. We were there to attend our
friend Sylvia’s wedding, and there was news that a hurricane might hit that weekend. “We never get tropical storms this time
of year,” Sylvia told us. “So bizarre. I hope Friday stays nice and dry.”

On Friday, Kate and I sipped cafe au lait as the rain poured down in sheets. We were sitting under the huge awning at Cafe
du Monde, and bedraggled pigeons pecked at our feet. The floor was heavily dusted with powdered sugar, and the pigeons looked
as unhealthy as could be — what you might expect from a diet consisting of powdered beignets. We were sorry for Sylvia and
her spoiled wedding, but in an hour the downpour had stopped and the sun was out again. It was so hot we could see steam rising
from the sidewalks.

We walked along Decatur Street past the fortune-teller stands in Jackson Square, and Kate glanced at me with a doubtful smile
that was at once ironic and full of longing. The fortune-tellers sensed Kate’s need and offered her a reading for ten dollars.
“Go ahead,” I encouraged her, and she presented her palm with sad, hopeful resignation to a gypsy woman whose sign declared
that she had thirty-seven years of palmistry experience.

“My dear,” the gypsy woman said immediately, “you are too obsessed with love. Your preoccupation has been with love, my dear,
and your mind has been clouded. You need more sense, my dear. Men are a dime a dozen, and you need to hurt them before they
hurt you. Forget them, my dear. They aren’t worth your love. You need to focus on other things. Have you ever thought about
going into the medical profession?” Kate stared at her blankly. “You write perhaps?” Kate nodded. “Keep writing and focus
on that. Start finishing things and begin acting with your head, my dear, instead of your heart.”

When the gypsy woman had finished, she regarded me with sharp, humorous eyes. “And you, my dear?” Her face, with its thick,
glossy skin, was the color of apricots, and her fingernails were painted a muddy orange. I shook my head, reluctant to part
with ten dollars, but Kate and I had not walked a block before I regretted it. The gypsy woman didn’t seem surprised when
we showed up at her stand again, and I smiled and gave her both my hands.

“You have a bright aura,” she said, looking at me and smoothing my left palm. “And you are not one to cry over spilled milk,
though you have suffered a recent disappointment, I see. He was not the right one for you, my dear. You are going to marry
a businessman in two and a half years. He will be rich, my dear, even though you don’t care about money. And you will have
three children, one quickly after the other. I know, my dear,” she said when she saw my face fall, “you are not patient with
children. I know this, but you will have three.”

Such was the fate the gypsy woman condemned me to. I felt a certain satisfaction that my life would turn out so dull. “A businessman!”
I said merrily. “Three children!”

Kate sighed. “Sometimes I think arranged marriages would have suited me just fine. I like the idea of being handed someone
and having no other options. It would save me time and a lot of worry. A man gives you a sign, he emits his little light,
and you move toward him, but then he just flickers off, and you’re left in the dark again. It’s like trying to catch a firefly.”

“Or a cab on a rainy day,” I said.

Kate mused. “Is a man more like a cab or a firefly?”

That evening Sylvia was married in City Park with three red roses in her hair. We felt a drop or two on our arms, and the
sun weaved fitfully in and out of the clouds, but a storm did not break over our heads and everyone commented on the luck
of the newlyweds. It seemed fitting that Sylvia, a passionate exhibitionist who was born on Valentine’s Day, should be married
between a tropical storm and a hurricane, possessing such grace as to be touched by neither.

The reception was held at the groom’s home, but because there had been no electricity in the neighborhood for four days, the
family had been forced to rent generators. Neighbors had come to their aid and donated fans, and these were spread out around
the yard and inside the house. Kate and I sat outside at a long table lit with candles, and it was pleasant to eat crawfish
gumbo and sip cold champagne, our dresses stirred by the blowing fans. Everyone spoke loudly over the drone of the generators,
and now and then I heard the intimate whine of a mosquito and slapped at my bare shoulders.

We gathered inside the house for a slide show. Photographs of Sylvia and her husband from the time they were children were
projected one after another onto the wall. A little Sylvia wearing her mother’s sunglasses sitting on a beach. A young Dan
sticking his hand in the mouth of a plastic shark. Photographs of them in Halloween costumes, smiling with their families,
sporting bell-bottoms, new perms, braces. A delightful naivete shone on their faces, for how were they to know what was coming
and who they were going to love? It was a story of two lives coming together, and I thought the slide show made a convincing
case for the hand of fate.

I couldn’t help but think of Vincent, whose childhood photos I had never seen. A few weeks ago, we had parted ways, and now
1 felt a bitterness rise up within me at the thought of his family, who would always be dear to him, who would always be in
his life, whereas I was shut out of it. The last time I had seen him, we had taken a walk together along the narrow country
road that ran in front of my house, and I had explained that I loved him and he said he felt nothing at all. Two large dogs
came running out from a neighboring farm, trailing beside us and barking. The dogs began chasing each other, and one of them
knocked into Vincent, who stumbled and fell. “Oh, my dear!” I said, reaching my hand toward him, but he moved away and got
up off the road by himself. I couldn’t understand it. He had loved me once, and now he couldn’t even bear to touch my hand.

Toward midnight, Sylvia rushed up to me and Kate to say good-bye. “I wish I had more time,” she said, and we watched as she
took off her satin high heels and exchanged them for sneakers. “I just wanted to say I love you both. I haven’t found such
good friends anywhere. I’m not drunk, I really mean all this. . .” And she pressed her hand to her heart, then hugged each
of us before she ran off to find Dan. In a short while, they were walking arm in arm to their battered blue VW van, as everyone
cheered and blew soap bubbles at them. Sylvia threw her bouquet out the window and Dan honked the van’s horn all the way down
the street, and then our lovely friends were gone.