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.

The key to miniature success, Jake realized as he marveled his way through the Costco of dolls that Sunday afternoon, was not just the level of detail but rather the level of verisimilitude. For instance, consider one item Jake saw on display, a boxed men’s shirt. If the only issue were detail, the miniature-makers would have labored over the box, asking themselves, Does it have the right store’s logo on it? But these craftsmen had a different priority in mind. Instead they asked themselves: first, if the shirt is in a box, can the box be opened? If so, is there a real shirt inside—not merely a bit of fabric but a real, tailored miniature shirt, complete with buttons, cuffs, and a real front pocket? If so, can the shirt be removed from the box? And if so, could a doll conceivably wear it? This was the level of reality Jake witnessed at the International Miniatures Show. It was exactly what he was looking for.