The man who approaches her is older than she’d ever seen Arthur, but younger than Arthur would have been if he’d lived. He possesses Arthur’s same wiry build, his lustrous hair. Only the symmetry is off. The lips are fuller, his eyes more heavily lidded. It takes Sherri’s breath away to look at him.

He reaches for her hand to shake it—such a simple gesture but she hardly knows what to do. Words come out of his mouth as if he’s trying to speak to her underwater, the way Sherri and Roberta had tried to speak when they were young. I’m going to tell you a secret, they’d say, and they’d sink down to the bottom of Booth Lake, trying to sit cross-legged on the sandy floor of the lake, the words always muffled and confusing. It takes her a while to process what he’s saying, but as soon as she does, the words bang against the back of her brain with such force she thinks she might faint.

“So,” he’s saying, “you were friends with my dad?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sherri stands in front of now-closed Lake Country Yoga, takes a deep breath, shoves her hand into her pocket, and reaches for her keys. Her body still knows this building as if she’s an extension of it. She’s kept her worn brass key on her chain all these years. She knows its weight and shape, and can blindly distinguish it from all the others.

She slips the key into the lock and listens for the pattern of clicks, knowing the sticky parts, waiting for the moment she’ll need to push it at the farthest point in the turn and lift the doorknob to nudge the stubborn lock loose. The tall old door creaks on its decorative brass Victorian hinges. She feels as though she’s moving a giant boulder away from a mouth of a cave.

She reaches to her right and flips the switch, still exactly where she remembers it, and braces herself for the fluorescent fixture’s antiseptic illumination and insidious hissing sound (her father had replaced the dingy bare yellow bulb during the energy crisis). She counts out the eleven creaky stairs that take her up to the landing with the coat tree where she’d had her own hook, only now Jerry’s giant overcoat slumps from it.

The hallway now smells like an old wool blanket. She continues from the landing up a shorter flight of stairs to the door. Tap tap tap—how strange to have to knock to enter her own home.

“Come in,” Jerry barks. He sits at the kitchen table with a napkin tucked into his shirt like a bib. “Well, well, there she is. How’s the return to your old stomping grounds?”