Being with someone, Jake believes, does not so much resemble a time as it does a place. A moment spent with Leora does not join the moments of his life alongside the other moments, sliding like a bead onto the string of his life and clicking into place next to the moment spent walking to meet her at a restaurant and followed by the moment spent squinting at the sky alone later that evening while trying to make out a star. No, a moment spent with Leora separates itself, refusing to associate with the drab neighborhood of memories around it, walling itself off like an ancient quarter of a city filled with crooked streets, where you don’t need to know where you are going because you are already there. Once he dreamed that she had become a tree, her feet rooted deep in the earth and her arms held high, sprouting leaves from the tips of her fingers, her wrists blooming with ripe, sweet fruits. Afraid to pick the fruits, he instead sank his teeth into them while they still dangled from her wrists. Of course, he can never tell this dream to her. Instead he decides to restore her dollhouse.

The idea came to him at work, when he overheard Jim, the departmental assistant, mention that he was going to upstate New York over the weekend for a miniatures show.

“Miniatures?” the student in the office asked. “Do you have a little girl with a dollhouse at home?”

“Don’t I wish it were as normal as that,” Jim half scowled, half smiled, with a good-natured exasperation that Jake always wished he had himself. “No, it’s my wife who’s obsessed with it.”

“Your wife?”

“Yup, thirty-two years old and going on ten!” he laughed. “She’s a collector, really. She’s got three of these dollhouses, and she’s always looking to expand. It’s a pretty good hobby when you live in a tiny apartment.”

Jake stood up at his desk for a moment, catching a glimpse of the student’s half-slackened jaw and lipsticked mouth through the narrow crack in his office’s slightly open door. “What does she buy at these shows?” she asked, fascinated. “Furniture?”

“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.