“Excuse me, I was wondering about a piece of merchandise I saw here a few weeks ago, and I can’t seem to find it now. Is there a storage room where it might be?”

The woman’s lips smacked together, making a popping sound. Leora realized she was chewing gum. “We don’t keep no back inventory. Probably moved.”

“Moved?” Leora asked. Not that tefillin walking off by themselves would be all that strange, she thought to herself, considering where else they had been.

“Yeah, as in, moved. M-O-V-E-D. Sold.”

“Sold?” Leora asked. Her voice squeaked.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” the woman said, cracking her gum again. “This ain’t brain surgery.”

Leora thought for a moment of the scientists at the Museum of Natural History cracking open the missing-link skull, as if they might find a missing-link brain inside it. “See, but you don’t understand, this isn’t the type of thing someone would buy,” Leora stuttered, confusing even herself.

The woman looked unimpressed. She peeled a piece of masking tape off her ring finger. “What’re you looking for?”

Leora felt herself turning red; she wanted to leave Random Accessories as soon as possible. It had all been a mistake. “They’re—tefillin. Like, uh—”

“Filling? Filling for what?”

Leora wanted to go bang her head against the wall. “Forget it,” she said. And she left.

LEORA WALKED back to her apartment, a walk that seemed much longer than its seven blocks. The city had grown dark. All around her, lights began to flicker on in the apartment buildings lining the deep streets, illuminating the rooms inside them like little slide panels of distant lands. Her own building seemed empty and gray. Inside the grimy, empty apartment vestibule, dirt collected as usual between the bathroomlike tiles on the floors and walls in front of the broken elevator. She was heading for the stairs, thanking the Laurens and Melanies of days gone by for choosing a second-floor apartment, when she realized that she hadn’t checked the mail that morning. Leora, Lauren, and Melanie shared an oversized mailbox in the building’s vestibule, and it had become Leora’s job to bring in the mail, much as Lauren had fallen into bathroom-cleaning. (Melanie did next to nothing, but Leora didn’t care enough to complain.)

Leora turned the key in the mailbox lock, and the door burst open as usual under a tidal wave of envelopes. She scooped the pile out, letting the three glossy catalogues slip to the floor. Credit card bills, mostly. A few promotional letters; piles of coupons; something from the SUNY Binghamton Alumni Association. Leora discovered that she May Already Have Won Ten Million Dollars, or perhaps Lauren or Melanie Had Already Won, since they had all been blessed with copies of the same letter. And then, a thick padded overnight mail envelope, bulging. For her.