I crossed the street and went into Dan Wilder’s Coffee and Pastry Shop, which is also part of the ritual of returning to the Catskills. Dan’s Coffee and Pastry Shop used to be The Cave. At least, that is what we called it. It is where I had lived in 1955, with three other young men—Carter and Joey Li and Eddie Grimes. The four of us slept on two bunk beds in the long, crowded room. Dan had purchased The Cave from Sammy and Lila and had renovated it, making the room deeper and installing a kitchen and pastry bar, and then he had placed several small tables along the walls. In winter, during the Belleayre ski season, it is Pine Hill’s most popular place. Dan’s pastries are as sweet and delicate as sugared air, or as thick and rich as heavy honey. He vows he can tell what a customer will buy before the customer asks for it. It is in the way their lips react, Dan contends, when they see the pastry they will have. “The lips move,” he says philosophically. “It’s like the beginning of a kiss. It’s an involuntary thing. They can’t help it.” He may be right. I have never fooled him, but I am a predictable customer. I always ask for the crumb cake, because it is a recipe from Nora Dowling.

I like Dan. Everyone does. He is a short man with a great, rounded girth shaped by years of sampling. The apron he wears fits over his chest and stomach like a sheet that has been tightly tucked. He is always smiling. Always. He has a voice that comes from his girth, a voice laced in laughter. When he is truly happy—when the shop is filled with people glad to be there—his voice is a bellow. Occasionally he will break into a lively Bavarian bar song and the crowd will sing with him.

Dan knows the table I prefer, and why I prefer it. It is the kind of sentiment he enjoys. The table is beside the wall where my bed used to be. One night, in 1955, I killed a fly on the wall and it stuck there. I drew a circle around it with a pencil, and beside the circle I wrote, Bobo Murphy kilt a fly on this spot, July 10, 1955. Dan swears he remembers seeing that circle and reading my declaration when he was renovating in 1985. He also swears the carcass of the fly was still there.

There was no one except Dan in the shop when I entered. He got my coffee—a special blend from Kilimanjaro, he said—and crumb cake and sat with me at my table. We were talking about Avrum’s death when Sammy Merritt pushed through the door and cried, “Bobo, what in hell’s name are you doing in this pigsty?”

“He’s having coffee, asshole,” Dan said easily. “Good coffee.”