You can stay as long as you like, he said.

Where do I sleep?

He did not answer, only glanced upward as if at a ghost passing before returning to his book.

I stepped on a low stair on which was written LIVE FOR HUMANITY and pulled the shop around me like a worn quilt; tatty armchairs, kitchen on the second floor, narrow staircases where people fell down drunk, doorways crowded with spirits. Stacks of books. On the walls were black-and-white photos of writers whose androgynous faces showed the torment and wonder of a life conjured by words.

I was awoken that night by fireworks in the sky over Notre-Dame, yellow and red and blue explosions of metal salts. In the bookshop refuge I read, and with a borrowed black pen I wrote on my backpack a twice-translated line by Basho—possessed by the spirits of wanderlust—and wondered what it looked like and sounded like in Japanese. I felt agreeably alone in the world, walking on cobblestone during the days and falling asleep among other wanderers at night.

—

I went to Paris because I wanted to be far from home. I was finished university and writing articles for Canadian Forum and waiting tables and trying to figure out how I wanted to live. Then, one night, my father was dancing with my mother and in the middle of “Sally Goodin” the electrical signals in his heart failed and he lost all feeling in his toes and fingers and his occipital cortex went black. Her hand was the last thing he must have seen as his long legs buckled. He crumpled toward the floor and in three minutes, the time it takes to boil an egg, my father was dead. I went home to be with Mam. She sat day after day at the kitchen table and said there was nothing to do but to accept the deaths of the men she loved. We buried his ashes together and my brother went back to work and Mam said she was going to learn to fly.

My brother was lucky. He was absorbed in his first year practising law. But I had no heart for my former life. I felt a new urgency to be in the world and I did not want to stay home with Mam. She told me secrets as if she had taken off a heavy coat in her grief. She drove to the airfield in the morning and when she came home she put on a messy half-open kimono and sat at the table and talked.

She said, I have ridden in an ambulance with my husband’s dead body. I have organized a cremation with a mortician who forced me to sit near him so he could tell me his troubles. I planned the words, ashes to ashes and joyful, joyful, melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the dark of doubt away. I am the widow who has buried her husband’s ashes in a velvet bag. I have mailed death certificates to strangers and paid death taxes and organized papers for banks and government departments. This is the business of death.