“Excuse me, would you care for a towel?”

The young woman turned to look at her, and Liz realized she’d been crying.

“Uh . . . yes, thank you. It started raining.” She was still crying, albeit silently; the tears kept rolling down her cheeks, leaving cinematically visible tracks in whatever grimy residue they were washing away.

“I’d ask if you were OK, but clearly you’re not,” said Liz, whose mastery of the précis was unsurpassed. She raised her voice and called to the back of the store, “Polly, bring a towel, will you?”

A muffled voice called back.

“No, I’m not OK,” said the woman. “I’m sorry about the floor.” She took a breath, and reached out to shake Liz’s hand. “My name is Laura Costello, and I’m having a bad day.” She realized that made her sound like a member of a twelve-step group with an extremely low requirement for membership, but it’s what came out.

“In what way bad?” asked Liz, always interested in other people’s disasters. She wondered what was taking Polly so long with the towel, then remembered she herself had used it to dry Ferdinand the store cat, who’d also missed the memo about the rain. Her brow furrowed slightly as she tried to remember what she’d done with it . . . Had she left it under the cat? Oh well, Polly would work it out. Liz refocused on Laura.

“Well,” said Laura, taking a deep breath and unloading at a rapid clip, “I moved here for grad school, but I came early so I could get settled and maybe line up some part-time work and today I had a job interview and it went well but I didn’t get it so I guess not that well and then I went home and my apartment building was on fire.” She paused. “Not my apartment building . . .”

Despite the narrative speed and slightly hysterical delivery, Liz was following. She nodded, her hands folded in front of her like a puzzled but hopeful maître d’. “I understood what you meant. I can see how that might put a kink in your knickers.”

Laura Costello looked at her cautiously, not entirely certain what knickers were, and sniffed. “So I called my grandmother for suggestions but she snorted and called me a wuss, and to distract me told me a friend of mine had cheated on her boyfriend Dave with Other Dave. The one with the toes.”

Liz was clinging to the thread, like the fantasy-genre jockey she was. “The original Dave was toeless?”

Laura shook her head. “No, he has toes, but Other Dave has extra toes.”

Liz raised her voice again. “Polly! Towel!”

“And then she said I could always come home, which she knew would calm me down because obviously that’s not what I want to do.”