“Oh, you wouldn’t believe what they have at these shows,” Jim answered in an insider’s deep tone. “I mean, it isn’t just little chairs and tables there. We’re talking barbecues, rugs, lawn mowers, molding, tiling, electrical lighting, trampolines. . . .”

Trampolines? Jake thought. Somehow the word illuminated something in his brain. Within the last few weeks, he had seen a trampoline. But where?

Sitting back down at his desk, he pictured the trampoline he had seen. It had been a giant one, about thirty feet across, yet it had been inside some sort of store, with giant stacks of boxes and other giant things alongside it—and then Jake remembered. Costco.

Two weeks earlier, he had been staying with Leora at her parents’ house when her mother had sent the two of them on an errand to Costco. Leora was in the driver’s seat, scooting her family’s car down the sort of overbuilt suburban strip mall that would have made his mother laugh out loud, escorting him through the garage-style doors and into an American wonderland of consumer products that would have made his mother laugh even louder. Jake laughed too, as they passed through each Grand Canyon-sized aisle, but not at the store. He laughed at Leora, who was competing in the Costco triathlon: heaving a truckload of Poland Spring bottles into the cart, racing down the mile-long aisle to get to the front of the free-sample line, scaling the warehouse cliffs to get a case of thirty-two rolls of toilet paper (“Why don’t you just take the stuff on the bottom shelf?” he asked, only to be berated, with the accompanying eye roll, “Two-ply, Jake, two-ply!”). Her exuberance in this giant’s wonderland enchanted him, all the more so because what he truly knew of her was her tiny side, her obsession not just with miniatures but with the miniature rooms of time itself. She had furnished his hours and days with her voice, decorating them with miniature details that she pointed out to him—a key embedded in the sidewalk, a particular shade of blue sky at a particular moment of twilight, a pocket mirror flashed at him to show him the look on his face—teaching him, at every moment, how to live his life in the present tense.

Jake pictured Leora’s dollhouse, which he had seen once, behind Leora’s back, in a state of disrepair in her parents’ basement, and suddenly he placed himself in the picture. He picked up the phone, reserved a rental car, and set out that Sunday for the miniatures show.