At the store, the clerk with the memorable hands greets me; we make rote mention of climate disaster and of the morning’s news.

Then they wink and say: “She’s downstairs, working on inventory. I’m sure she’d love a visit.”

Downstairs is a cramped black-box theater where fiction and poetry readings take place when the weather turns cold, making the more inviting backyard unusable. But until November or so, the tiny black-painted stage serves as a sorting platform for incoming used books. Sometimes, after a bibliophile has died—as two local ones just have, one from cancer, one from apparent suicide—the stacks reach the height of a person.

My clerk is not in the theater, though, but in the even more minuscule adjacent “office,” with the lights off and an old freestanding AC roaring, her outline illuminated by the glow of an on-screen spreadsheet.

She stands up and turns around, having sensed me in the doorway, and in turning around she turns time back nearly twenty years; we’re in the walk-in cooler at the restaurant, it’s the middle of an endless, cocaine-fueled Saturday-night shift, a shift we know will end with several of us naked on the carpeted floor of the head waiter’s apartment; it’s not the beginning but not quite the middle of the slow buildup that, though predictable because habitual, is still the best method we’ve invented for fighting the more deadly predictability of its obedient alternative: punch in, punch out, count tips, go home. We, the clerk and I, are suddenly there, which means we’re suddenly kissing, half-laughing, seriously joking or joking seriously about the insistence of injecting bodily pleasure into a place of work. By the time she slides her hand down the front of my skirt, the joke has won and we’re only laughing, no longer kissing even; she extracts her hand and we hug each other and rock back and forth, now teary, the embrace we were too stunned to perform the day I walked into the bookstore and found her unaccountably there and that on our subsequent meetings would have seemed arbitrary, out of sequence. She says, “I’m off at five, you free for a drink?” and I say I am, and I go back upstairs and look for the book I want, and find it.

I fell in love during the time of my clerk’s well-curated sessions, but not with the clerk herself. This was a thing that only ever went so far, a groove that (we now know) has not been entirely filled in by time. So it isn’t exactly that we have unfinished business. But I’d thought she was dead. And the more I think about her prior art form in relation to Love and Anti-Love, the more questions I have.