“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

He looked mildly affronted. “I made it.”

“Yosh, you amaze me.”

“Hey, the way I figure it, you gotta eat. So you gotta learn to read a recipe. It’s like being able to tune your bike.” He flushed and shot a quick glance at me, to see if that had been an unfortunate thing to say.

I asked quickly, “You mean you do stuff besides cheesecake?”

“Oh, yeah. But hey, I didn’t take home ec. or anything. I taught myself how.”

I nodded. “More manly that way.”

“Like you’d know, guy. Hey, that woman, the cop, what’s her name? Rico. She was by your place a couple times.”

Ah. “Did you tell her I was mostly over here?”

Yoshi looked down at his feet for just long enough to suggest that there was a story in that, and that he wasn’t going to tell it to me. “Well, the second time I did. Like, once I figured that you’d want me to, I told her. I mean, you did want me to, right?”

“I did. You’re a standup kinda guy, Yosh.” Well, maybe I could ask Rico—Sunny—what they’d said to each other. If she dropped in.

Wolfboy and Sparks came up a few hours after that, to consult me about the last arrangements for the funeral, which was the next day. I didn’t know Sparks very well, and I’d been afraid I’d be uncomfortable putting matters partly in her hands, maybe having to accept the wrong sort of sympathy from her and be polite about it, for Wolfboy’s sake. But she seemed to be transformed by the occasion from sweet, self-conscious, and slightly vague to capable, sensible, and slightly brisk. When I hinted at that (a lot more tactfully than I’ve described it here), she nodded. “I turn into my mom my granny, and all my aunts. What they don’t know about laying people out’s not worth knowing.”

We settled what needed settling, and I asked, “How’s the store?”

Sparks looked at Wolfboy as he limbered up his pen, and I was impressed. I’d known a lot of relationships where one partner answered all the questions addressed to the other one, and those had been pairs of people who could both speak.

Slow, Wolfboy wrote. Didn’t realize how many of the customers were elves.

I frowned, and he pulled the notebook back toward him. You’ve been away. The virus is spreading, and the ones who don’t have it are staying out of public places so they won’t get it.

“I guess I have been away. And I didn’t even go anywhere.”

Knew that, he wrote. You’d have sent me a postcard.

“Trust me,” I told him, “the view really sucked.”