It was a very small joke they had. Once, about four years ago, Westy’s had served, for one day, the most delicious mushroom soup he’d ever tasted. They’d never offered it again, but he’d never stopped looking on the specials board for it every time he went in. Occasionally he put in a request, but the teenager at the register clearly had no say over soups.

The edges of Commercial Street were covered in a thick, lumpy layer of ice, and he watched them cross it slowly without touching. But they were talking a lot. Blue puffs came out of their mouths at the same time. They opened the door to Westy’s and disappeared. They’d probably eat at one of the booths. He couldn’t very well complain if once in the three months she’d been working there she ate her lunch out instead of bringing it back.

There was a couple in the far room whispering in fiction. He’d been pricing a stack of books he’d just bought from a composer, but now that Kate was gone he’d lost his concentration. He went down the aisle her friend had chosen and pulled out, one by one, the books he’d looked at. Each one was a decent book in a sea, he acknowledged with familiar shame, of mediocre books. He would have liked to have an intensely intellectual selection—no confessional poetry, no mass-market psychology, no coffee-table crap. But as it was, business was precarious. Most intellectuals were like the composer: selling, not buying. A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors. Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

“Hey, where are you?” She pulled on his sleeve. “I got it! Mushroom soup!” She held up two containers. She was smiling as wide as he’d ever seen. Her nose was red and dripping and beautiful. “It better be as good as you promised.”

Hadn’t she already eaten? Where was the guy in the green coat? How much did he owe her? Questions swarmed but stayed behind the tight knot in his throat.