“Do you think I’m crazy to do what I do?”

“No,” I said. “No, you’re not crazy.”

Sammy smiled. “You ready for that favor?”

“Yes,” I answered.

The door was partly opened to my room and Lila stepped into it without knocking. She sniffed the air dramatically and said, “I knew it. Sex. Definitely sex, and that’s against the rules. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“That’s not musk you smell,” I said. “It’s dust.”

She laughed and sat on the bed next to my suitcase. “Did you get everything done?”

“Yes. Sammy’s taking care of the last thing for me.”

“Oh, that’s what he’s doing?” she said. “I saw him leave, but he didn’t say where he was going.”

I thought of Sammy’s warning about Lila’s fear of being alone. “He won’t be gone long,” I told her.

She picked up a shirt I had stuffed into my suitcase and began refolding it.

“So, Bobo Murphy, is this the last time I see you?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I’m like a migrating bird. Every couple of years, I hear something calling from up here and I have to find some wings.”

“Amy?” she asked quietly.

I took the shirt from her and placed it in the suitcase and closed it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t ask. It’s none of my business.”

“Yes, it is your business,” I replied. “It’s Amy, yes, and it’s you, and it’s Sammy, and it’s Dan and Carter and that little girl who keeps riding up and down the street on her bicycle and never speaks. It’s Avrum. And Sol Walkman, and all those old people at the Home. There’s something about this place that affects me. Avrum used to tell me this is where my life changed, and maybe he was right, even if he was a dreamer.”

Lila looked at me quizzically.

I sat on the bed beside her and took her hands. “Look, I care for Amy,” I confessed. “Maybe from the first moment I saw her sitting in Arch’s with Carter, or maybe it’s just something Carter made up and I came to believe it. It doesn’t matter. I wish I knew the answer, Lila. I wish I could find whatever’s missing. I only know that something is over, in one place or the other.”

“At least you had some time together,” Lila said gently.

“Yes, we did. And do you know what was beautiful about it?”

“Tell me,” she said.

“It was exactly what I knew it would be.”

“Doesn’t that tell you something, Bobo?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe it should, but I don’t know.”

I asked Lila not to walk with me to my car and she understood.

“I want to sit on Avrum’s bench a few minutes,” I said.