He’d hired Kate three months ago. She’d recently moved to Portland from San Francisco for a man named Lincoln. They lived in a small apartment in Bayside. On their answering machine, Lincoln sounded high-strung and full of anticipation, as if he only ever expected good news after the beep. Despite her strong résumé, Kate had unexpected gaps in her knowledge of books. She had never read The Leopard or The Go-Between. She had never even heard of Machado de Assis. Once he overheard a customer ask how many lines were in a sestina, and she didn’t know. She was a reader (she borrowed and returned as many as ten books a week) but not a speller. On the dupe sheet, she wrote J. Austin and F. Dostoyevski. At the end of the day, when she stapled the credit card receipts to the ticker tape totals, she didn’t always align the edges evenly. She let the mechanical pencils run out of lead. She had thin, sometimes dry lips that she picked at when she was thinking deeply and that he would have liked to kiss.

Wanting to kiss Kate was like wanting a larger savings account for Paula’s college education or one of those infallible computerized postal scales for mail orders. It was a persistent, irritating, useless desire. He had been on two dates since Paula’s mother left. The first one, over five years ago now, had been a setup, a friend of a friend. They’d gone to an Italian restaurant for pasta puttanesca. She’d picked out all of her capers and left them on the lip of her bowl, explaining that she was allergic to shellfish. Then she’d wanted to talk about his wife’s departure. The story—his college buddy Brad coming to visit from Australia and leaving two weeks later with a box of live lobsters and Mitchell’s wife—seemed to arouse her. He couldn’t bear to take her out again and lost the mutual friend as a result. Thankfully, others had left him alone.

He hadn’t been devastated when his wife walked out. People vanished. It had been happening all his life. His mother died when he was six, his father nine years later. His best friend from childhood, Aaron, had found a lump on his back—Mitchell himself had spotted it first on the beach—and he was dead by Labor Day. Even his favorite customer, Mrs. White, had died within a few years of the shop’s opening.

Mitchell stood at the stockroom’s one window and watched three gulls flap restlessly above the harbor. Thick broken slabs of ice, the size of mattresses, had been pushed to the shore by the tide. Out farther, beyond the frozen crust, the open water shimmered a luminous summer blue. In these kinds of cold spells everything seemed confused. Even the gulls overhead seemed lost.