“You must move here,” Paul insisted in Paul’s hand-talking way. “Here you can feel life. How can you do that in any city? Listen to me; I know. San Francisco, such a place. Wonderful. But it takes your life from you. Here you reclaim it. Come, come, sit. We must have a glass of wine to celebrate a new neighbor.” He dashed away.

Maggie led us to a table near a bay window and Paul returned from the kitchen holding a bottle of wine that he proclaimed as a superior French chardonnay. “None of that water from California,” he crowed as he opened the bottle and sniffed the cork in closed-eye delight. He poured a taste for Amy. She smiled agreement. “Wonderful,” she said.

Dinner was to be the same as it had been with Sammy and Lila—the menu ignored. “Tonight, a lobster,” Paul declared. “Yes?” He disappeared, his voice ringing in the restaurant, causing smiles from the three other couples already eating.

“They’re fresh,” Maggie whispered to us. “And he loves to do lobster, but if—”

“It’s perfect,” Amy assured her. She looked at me.

“I never argue with an artist,” I said.

“Then I think I’d better go keep him under control,” Maggie said. “He is French, you know. They do have a way of letting their passions get away from them.” She swept away from us, pausing at each table of guests on the way to the kitchen.

“I like them,” Amy said. “I’m glad you suggested this.”

“Me, too,” I told her. “I like feeling special.”

Amy glanced at me, held the look. A smile trembled across her face. She reached for the wineglass, touched the rim of it with her fingertip.

“What is it?” I asked.

She continued to gaze at the wineglass, continued to stroke its rim with her fingertip.

“I was thinking how—how strange this is. How strange and, yet, how good,” she answered quietly. “I never thought it would happen. Seeing you again.”

“Me, either,” I said.

“Avrum told me it would, though. He said I would see you again.”

“He did?”

She pushed the wineglass away from her hand and picked up her salad fork and began to press the letter R into the white tablecloth. A playfulness glittered in her eyes.