Just as I was about to follow my Stanley instincts, the bathroom door opened.

Helen Roper emerged. Tall, dazzling Helen. The wig complemented Rita’s face, made her look daring and jaunty somehow, and the jewelry sparkled around her as if emitting its own light. She looked as if she were more three-dimensional than anything else in the room. The bottom hem of her muumuu was a little short.

“Oh, Stanley!” she said again in an exaggerated tone, and I laughed. I was standing by the bureau near the bedroom window. “What do you think?” she asked, twirling around.

I stood there like a brick. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh yeah?” She came closer to me so we were standing face to face. I looked and looked at her. Every time I saw her I felt like something was being smoothed within me, a rough patch I forgot I had until I laid eyes on her again.

In the living room, the record reached the end of the side and turned itself over automatically. We both heard it click, and listened to the first notes of the second side begin to play. It was a slow song full of longing.

“And what now?” she said. “What are we supposed to do now?”

We were standing very close. At some point she was touching my arm. She was leaning down and kissing me, her tongue slipping past my lips, her hands on my face, then my neck, and her arms were gathering me to her. And then I truly was Mr. Roper, unable or unwilling to comprehend love, or what it was to receive love—any kind of love—and scared of being subsumed by a body, or by desire. But I also wanted it, my insides now one fiery, throbbing mess. And though I was afraid of wanting it, there I was, getting it.

Outside, beyond the window, night was falling, hurrying itself into a new year. Tomorrow the newspapers would start over again in 1977.

Rita took me by the hand and led me to the bed. I sat down, and she stood before me, holding both of my hands. “What do you say,” she said softly. “Is this okay?”

I nodded and swallowed. My eyes were closed, and then I opened them.

We lived life as the Ropers for a year, and then another and another, losing track of the days except when the seasons told us it was too hot or too cold, or when it snowed and we had to suit up as our old, original selves and shovel and salt the stairs and walkways. Time passed smoothly. The days flowed in and out of one another like a thread being woven in an infinite cloth.

We rewrote history when it came to the original characters. I cannot say we hated one another, not even sometimes, and we rarely fought. Sometimes we forgot about being the Ropers entirely and lapsed into our other selves, laughing and helping one another, avoiding discord. Some days I wondered where this gift had come from. It hadn’t seemed possible at that point in my life, that luck would come again so completely. I wondered who Rita was, where she’d come from, what her full backstory was beyond the few things she had shared, but I kept the questions at a minimum. It was a kindness I was returning. She never asked and I never told her about the robbery, or about Geannie or Jim or Hernan, or Krystal, or the lottery. Miraculously, she had never even asked where the money came from. Where would I have even started had I told that story? And what did it matter now?