“I’m sick,” says Mimi. “I could die. I may not have time for the seven-day, winter-tipi version.”

So, Mimi eats the rice and the banana. I help her with the crackers and the ginger ale.

“Aren’t you the knight errant,” Mimi says when I’ve finished the telling.

“Kalea reminded me a little of you.”

“Which makes you Bryce?”

I hadn’t thought of that, but now that Mimi says it out loud, I realize that Bryce and I have more in common than I’d like to admit. I try to remember what I was like at his age, and I don’t like what I find.

“So, you met a young woman in a shaky relationship with a guy who’s full of himself, and she’s pregnant?”

“Maybe she’s pregnant.”

“Still, it doesn’t sound good.”

“We got through it.”

“By then, we had already had a child,” says Mimi. “That probably helped.”

“What would you have told her?”

Mimi motions for me to lie down on the bed. I move the towel with the food and put my head on her lap.

“Too heavy?”

“No,” she says. “So, what’s really on your mind?”

I close my eyes. It’s comfortable here. All things considered, I might just stay.

“Are you wondering how we got from there to here? From this Calley to me?”

“Kalea.”

Mimi smiles and strokes my head. “And from this Bryce to you?”

Sometimes jokes cut deeper than the truth.

“Is this about that woman in Toronto? The one with the typewriters?”

MIMI AND I DIDN’T get back together all at once. It took the better part of a year to sort everything out and put the past behind us. She had spent the “lost time,” as we called it, with family and friends. So far as I knew, she had not taken up with anyone, no affairs, no one-night stands, whatever the difference might be.

If there was a difference.

The typewriter I had in those early days had been an old Remington portable that I had dragged around the country with me. And then I had switched to a word processor, a computer with a keyboard that beat the typewriter hands down for efficiency but had all the charm of a sock.

Mimi had complimented me on my flexibility, had supported the technological move. She had even made a joke about the change. A dinosaur, she would begin, walks into the twentieth century.

But now that we were back together, here was another typewriter, a nicer typewriter than the Remington. A strange and unexpected typewriter. A typewriter that had appeared out of nowhere.

Mimi didn’t take it head-on. She’d come into my office, ask me how the writing was going. She’d run a hand over the machine and wait for me to offer up an explanation. At first, I kept my mouth shut, pretended that the typewriter had been there all along.