“Frankie?” she asked, but she knew it was me, of course. She’d found me.

“That’s me,” I said. “That is my name, yes.”

“I’m Mazzy,” she said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me. Do you think I could sit down? Could we talk?”

I wondered what it would feel like to say, “Hmm . . . no,” and then stand up and get in my car and whip it into traffic, nearly causing a massive accident, and then never talk to her.

“Sure,” I said, “I mean, I feel like we’d better talk.”

She slid into the other side of the booth and then stood right back up. “Could I get something to eat? I’m starving.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s fine. I would, well, maybe I’d have picked somewhere else if I knew we were going to eat.”

“This place isn’t good?” she asked.

“No, it’s really good,” I said. “It’s really good . . . in my opinion.”

“Well, if you say it’s good, I’m going to go with that,” she replied, and she stalked off to order. And then I knew I didn’t want to sit there while she ate, staring at her, so I went and ordered ten Krystals, large fries, two Corn Pups, and a large Dr Pepper. It would be good, I thought, to feel slightly sick as everything changed.

While we ate, she explained who she was, which was nice to hear, because for some reason, I had not even looked her up online. Why had I not looked her up online? I think I wanted to keep believing that it wasn’t real, that I would show up and no one would be there to meet me and I could walk right back into my old life.

She was an art critic, and she focused mostly on lesser-known New York artists, mostly painters, mostly women, but she had discovered a painter named Henry Roosevelt Wilson, and was writing a book about him. He was from upstate New York, a place called Keene, and had lived on a farm with his wife, Henrietta Wilson (Henry and Henrietta, holy god), and he’d mostly painted these ghostlike portraits on salvaged doors that he purchased at estate sales. He was a fairly minor painter in his lifetime, though he had been in some group exhibitions in New York and San Francisco. He had also been a pitcher and played Double-A for a farm team of the Milwaukee Brewers before he broke his arm trying to climb into a second-story window after curfew. His mother and father had been murdered in a botched robbery when he was seven, and he had lived in an orphanage until he was fourteen, and it was at the orphanage where he had started painting on doors.