Everyone has idiosyncrasies. Balzac drank over fifty cups of coffee a day. John Steinbeck kept exactly twelve sharpened pencils on his desk to make sure he always had writing implements. Flannery O’Connor had a thing for domestic poultry. Benjamin Franklin started each day with an “air bath,” which consisted of sitting in the nude and exposing his private parts to the morning breezes.

Mimi counts things. She’ll count almost anything, but she’s particularly fond of keeping track of bodily functions. She likes to tell me how many bowel movements she’s had in a day, how long it takes for her to pee—her record is forty-one seconds—and the amount of mucus she snorts out on her daily jogs.

And now that she’s noted the number of spiders and their size, I can’t get to sleep. We can hear the tourists outside the window as they walk back and forth across the bridge in the dark, and we can hear music floating on the night air.

Mimi sits up suddenly, slides out of bed, and goes to the window. I stay where I am. I know trouble when I see it.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

I imagine that most cities are beautiful at night, when all you see are the lights against a night sky, when everything else is in shadows.

“Look.” Mimi drags me out of bed and marches me to the window. The cafés are aglow. Reflections dance off the cobblestones. “Everyone is so happy. Are you happy?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “I’m happy.”

“Shit, Bird,” she says, “can’t you lie any better than that?”

Now that Mimi is awake, there’s no stopping her. I vote for staying in the room, but evidently, this is not what people on vacation do. So we get dressed and find our way to a café, where a man is playing a guitar and a woman is singing.

Mimi turns to me. “‘I’ll Be Seeing You’?”

“It was big in the ’40s,” I tell her.

“Sure, but why are they singing American tunes in the Czech Republic?”

Mimi and I stand off to one side and let the music flow over us. We stick around long enough to hear the woman sing most of the songs that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole made famous—“Let’s Fall in Love,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Again,” “Unforgettable”—and the music makes me somewhat homesick. If I were home, I’d be in front of the television right now with Muffy and a sandwich.

Happy, well fed, safe.

WE DIDN’T GET a dog from the humane society. But a week later, Mimi came home from her weekly jaunt to the thrift stores. She has a circuit that she works, much like a trapper on a trapline.

Salvation Army. Goodwill. Value Village.

And each time she goes, she comes home with a large plastic sack. Sometimes several.