The sky was swollen and low. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to half a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some cult had thrown all the infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper to bumper all the way to Plantation Key.

Alan sat out on the patio, a bottle of wine under his chair, the wineglass in his hand half full of rain, half full of wine. “Lindsey!” he said. “Want a drink?” He didn’t get up.

She said, “Alan? It’s raining.”

“It’s warm,” he said and blinked fat balls of rain out of his eyelashes. “It was cold where I was.”

“I thought you were going to make dinner,” she said.

“Oh.” Alan stood up and made a show of wringing out his shirt and his peasant-style cotton pants. The rain collapsed steadily on their heads.

“There’s nothing in your kitchen. I would have made margaritas, but all you had was the salt.”

“Let’s go inside,” Lindsey said. “Do you have any dry clothes? Where’s your luggage, Alan?”

He gave her a sly look. “You know. In there.”

She knew. “You put your stuff in Elliot’s room.” It had been her room, too, but she hadn’t slept there in almost a year. She only slept there when she was alone.

Alan said, “All the things he left are still there. Like he might still be in there, too, somewhere down in the sheets, all folded up like a secret note. Very creepy, Lin-Lin.”

Alan was only thirty-eight. The same age as Lindsey, of course, unless you were counting from the point where he was finally real enough to eat his own birthday cake. She thought that he looked every year of their age. Older.

“Go get changed,” she said. “I’ll order takeout.”

“What’s in the grocery bags?” he said.

She slapped his hand away. “Nothing for you,” she said.

close encounters of the absurd kind

She’d met Elliot at an open mike in a pocket universe in Coconut Grove. A benefit at a gay bar for some charity. Men everywhere, but most of them not interested in her. By the time Alan’s turn came, he was already drunk or high or both. He got onstage and said, “I’ll be in the bathroom.” Then he carefully climbed off again. Everyone cheered. Elliot was on later.