Mitchell hadn’t thought about the actual Mrs. White in a long time. When he thought about her now it was just a feeling, not a person, just a deep longing. He hadn’t known her very well. “At ease,” she used to say to him when she came in. She’d sit on the hard pink chair in science, reading Stephen Jay Gould. They’d shared a laugh once, when a girl a few years older than Paula moved swiftly through the store to the picture of Thomas Pynchon that hung on the back wall and burst into tears. It was the only picture of Pynchon available then, and not many people had ever seen even that, a reproduction of his high school yearbook photo, teeth like a donkey’s. “The only person who should cry over that picture is his mother,” Mrs. White had said.

Kate allowed him his silence. She didn’t try to reframe the question or ask another. Mrs. White would have done the same thing. What was she like? She was like you, he realized, watching Kate scrape out the last sip of soup with a plastic spoon.

“She was like you,” he said, incredulous.

The following day he couldn’t bear her to be so far from him and told her, at the risk of her finding more dates, that she didn’t have to spend more than an hour a day addressing flyers. He stayed at the counter with her, but they spoke very little. He pored through the boxes of books people lugged in from their cars, she took money from the customers, and in between they priced in silence. He wanted to ask her if she was planning to move back to San Francisco, or somewhere else, but every time he rehearsed it in his head, it sounded like a boss’s question and not a friend’s. Just before closing, a customer came up to the counter and asked if they were related. “You two have the exact same kind of eyes,” he told them. He was drunk and the comment was preposterous. Kate had warm thick-lidded brown eyes, and his were a narrow, suspicious green. The man didn’t have a coat and they watched him lurch away into the frozen air. They were careful not to look at each other’s eyes. It was only yesterday, the day of the mushroom soup, but it was already far away.

Mitchell comforted himself with the thought of Saturday, the day after next, when Paula would be there with them. But that night she told him she had play practice in the morning—she’d been cast as Rooster in Annie—and that her friend Holly had invited her over afterward.

Once he recovered from that blow, he saw on his calendar that the fourteenth of February fell on a Tuesday, the fifth Tuesday of Spanish lessons.