“So you’re not originally from New Jersey, are you?” Leora’s father asked, stifling a yawn. It was getting late.

“Oh no. I was born in Vienna,” Bill Landsmann replied, though he was paying more attention at the moment to getting the slide carousel back into its old box.

“Really?” Leora’s mother asked, and Leora and her parents glanced at each other. Being as old as Bill Landsmann was, being a Jew, and being born in Vienna seemed to demand an explanation. Here was a man, Leora thought briefly, who shouldn’t be alive.

But no explanation came. “Hm,” Leora’s mother murmured, giving him a few more seconds to fill in the blank. He didn’t. There was an awkward silence until Anna returned, heading for the screen to put it back into the closet.

“And are you from Europe as well?” Leora’s father asked, lobbing his question toward Anna.

Bill Landsmann answered for her as she closed up the screen and ducked into the closet again. “No, Anna, she is a real American. She has been here her whole life.” Leora revised her earlier take on things. Bill Landsmann was the magician here, the master of the conversational sleight-of-hand. Anna was merely his assistant.

“Yes, I’ve been here my whole life, born and bred,” Anna announced as she emerged from the closet, opening her mouth at last, then reverting back to that gracious smile of hers. Her voice proved her words true, however. It was completely accent-free. As she collected the coffee cups, she turned briefly to Leora, fidgeting with the spoons for a moment to keep Leora from noticing her eyes, which, Leora noticed, were glued to the floor. “You should know,” Anna stuttered softly, “that Naomi talked about you all the time. She really loved you,” she finished, on a high note that accidentally squeaked as it made its way out of her mouth. Leora looked up at her, but Anna was already on her way back to the kitchen. It was the only time Naomi’s name was mentioned that night.

In the car on the way home, Leora’s parents reflected, as they often had after passing buildings or mud huts or cliffs or baboons in other countries, that the evening had been “interesting, really interesting.” But not as interesting as all the other things they had to do in their lives, apparently, since Leora was the only one who went back.

LEORA’S SECOND mistake concerning Bill Landsmann was that she went back to visit him again. He had called her up to tell her that she had left her sweater at his house, and then he asked her to come over to pick it up and to see a few more slides. Leora didn’t want to go. She’d had that hollow nauseous feeling less and less in recent months, but the thought of returning to Bill Landsmann’s house prompted it again. Yet Bill Landsmann cornered her on the phone, letting her choose when she would like to come, and Leora couldn’t summon up an excuse. She agreed to stop by.