Paul had phoned on his cell around noon to ask whether I could check in his room and see whether he’d left a science assignment on top of his dresser. I was on the cordless. “Okay, I’m in your room now, looking at the top of your dresser, and I see no science assignment,” I said.

He paused at the other end of the line. “Pull back my covers and see if it’s in my bed.”

I tried that. “No luck,” I said. “But I have found a Penthouse.”

“Never mind.”

I hadn’t heard anything from Angie, although before leaving in the morning she informed me that I owed her $127. Had I borrowed $127 from her, I asked, because if I had, my memory had been wiped clean of the incident. She sighed and reminded me that we had agreed to reimburse her for half of the cost of her new pants and top, an arrangement about which I knew nothing.

“I told her that,” Sarah said.

“Well then, you owe her $127.”

Sarah said we needed romaine, maybe a couple of steaks, and we were totally out of fabric softener. I expressed concern about how often we were using the barbecue, which, by the way, I still had to get fixed.

“There was a story, in your paper, about how when meat cooks over hot coals, it turns into pure cancer.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” she said. As we passed the newsstand, the cover of Time, which was about a new blockbuster science fiction movie, caught my eye.

“I’ll just be a sec,” I said, and Sarah rolled on ahead without me.

I flipped through the Time, glanced at the covers of several other magazines (Oprah had managed to make the cover of her own magazine again, which I thought warranted some sort of inquiry), and quickly scanned my eye over the newly released paperback novels. By the time I decided to rejoin Sarah, she was long gone.

I walked along the front of the store, between the checkouts and the ends of the aisles, peering down each one, looking for a glimpse of her.

I spotted her down the aisle where they kept all the pastas and tomato sauces and twenty-three different kinds of Kraft Dinner. She was about three-quarters of the way down, and about halfway stood a nearly empty shopping cart, purse tucked into the spot where you can place small children. As is usually the case, Sarah had her eyes on the shelves, and not on the cart, or the purse. Fortunately, there was no one else anywhere near the cart, so she wasn’t immediately at risk of having it snatched.