Bill Landsmann was so shocked that he actually stopped talking. Leora could almost feel the silence on the phone. And then he hung up.

A STRANGE THING happened to Leora after she blew up at Bill Landsmann: she started to wonder where he was. When she stopped hearing from him, it occurred to her that she would never find out if something had happened to him, or where his next “travels” would be. She never would have dreamed that such a thing would bother her, but his absence began to weigh on her brain. She began driving by his house occasionally, taking a wide detour when she was returning home in the afternoons or evenings. (Months earlier, she used to drive by Naomi’s old house, but now a new family had moved in. New and improved, with all its children intact.) Most people in her town liked to leave their curtains open, Leora had noticed on these dark evening or late afternoon drives. At night you could peer into their houses and examine their furniture, or see people talking together and imagine what they were talking about, guessing, based on the angle of a gesticulating arm, whether they were joking with each other, or worrying aloud, or getting into a fight. The Landsmanns, however, chose to keep their curtains closed at all times. Was anyone home? Was Bill Landsmann sitting in his darkened living room admiring his slides of the Jews of Birobidzhan? Did he even look at his slides when no one else was around? Or had he taken off for Uzbekistan, or Zimbabwe, or some other distant corner of the earth to track down their fellow Jews? She was thinking about him on the day she wandered into the phone booth at the high school, which was how they came to meet again.

Nobody makes glass phone booths anymore, Leora knew, but they still had one at the high school, the old glass kind where you can see who’s talking from the outside but can’t hear what they’re saying. Inside it was an old rotary pay phone and a thick municipal telephone directory. They used to play a game with this phone booth, she and Naomi. There was another pay phone outside, about fifty yards away and plainly visible from the booth through the school’s glass front doors, and one day Naomi figured out how to make calls from one phone to the other. After that, they had made a little system of it. Naomi walked home from school each day, while Leora took the bus. Normally you couldn’t see the school bus coming unless you were outside the school, where nobody wanted to wait on cold winter days. To spare Leora the cold, Naomi devised a method. After each school day ended, Leora would wait in the phone booth, and Naomi would call her as she began her walk home, giving her advance notice on whether the bus had arrived. It wasn’t practical in the least, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the thrill of the anticipatory moment, the delight of the wait inside the soundproof booth, the long-distance smile when the phone would ring and Leora would know it was for her. Lately, Leora had gotten in the habit of using the school’s side door, avoiding the phone booth entirely. Besides, she wasn’t interested in games anymore. Leora had always been a good student, but after Naomi died, schoolwork had become an obsession. She plunged into history books, memorized chemistry equations, could name the capital and describe the type of government of nearly any country in the world; she became class valedictorian. By spring of her senior year, she had been admitted to every college she applied to, with an application essay about how her travels had given her a broad new perspective on life, eyes with which to see the world.