She looked at his face for the first time. He was a familiar stranger, someone you know you haven’t met but could have, perhaps should have. There was a little Bing Crosby in the heart-shaped mouth, a little Walt Whitman (when he was younger and kept his beard trimmed). There was even a bit of Gerald Ford somewhere, maybe only because she’d recently read an article about his hidden integrity and decency. It was clear that the only way she was going to discover how there could be another novel with that name, despite the searches she’d done to make sure there wasn’t, was to let the man in.

So often, when she made a dubious decision like this, she followed it up extravagantly, as if flaunting it to her better judgment. She led him into their small living room and said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’ll take a gin martini if you’ve got it.” He gave his trousers a quick tug before bending to sit in the middle of the couch. A diaper peeked out from beneath his left thigh though he didn’t notice it. He balanced the book on his gray flannel knees. She smiled, waiting for him to acknowledge his joke. A cocktail at nine thirty in the morning.

He smiled back. “On the rocks.”

“I’ve got coffee, seltzer, OJ, tap water.”

“Hmm?”

“What can I get you, really?” Her anger was back. The baby was asleep and her writing time was dwindling. Why had she let him in?

“Here, let me help you with the martini.” He nestled the paperback in the seat of the bouncy chair on the coffee table.

She followed him into the kitchen. “I’m sorry but that’s not a possibility. We don’t have any—”

He opened the pantry door and there, instead of the teetery plywood shelves her husband had nailed in, instead of the thin boxes of rice and couscous, instead of the baby’s mixed grain cereal and jars of sweet potatoes, instead of the pasta and beans and cans of soup and the precious bottle of sun-dried tomatoes from Liguria she had splurged on but never wanted to use, was a long, glass-covered counter stocked with two chrome shakers, a strainer, a jar of onions, a jar of pimiento olives, a box of toothpicks, five glass swizzle sticks, and the ice bucket with the silver pine cone sticking up on top. She didn’t have to look any farther to know that below, behind the white cabinet doors, were bottles of vodka, gin, bourbon, and vermouth or that above, upside down on paper towel lining, were her father’s Class of ’62 highballs, the muscular bull fading with all the trips through the dishwasher of her youth.

“I’m glad you’ve got Beefeater,” the man said over his shoulder. “No need to get any fancier than that.”