This voice was like none I’d heard from him, loud and jangly, like a large sack of coins shaken onto a table. He was grinning. What was rolling in Pittsburgh? Now he knew.

He made a spiral around his temple with his finger, indicating crazy. Did this mean him or the other guy? I didn’t care. I liked seeing him summoned into this strange world and imagining the way he was important there, the way he shook off his own stuttering questions and spoke clear and forceful words, never apologized to anyone.

Tilly obsessed herself with turning his bare loft into a home. She arranged and then she rearranged, asked me what I thought of her new arrangements. One blue ceramic vase migrated across bookshelves, nightstands, perched briefly on a little table near the door. “This table is for mail,” Abe said. “I thought that’s what it was for.”

Tilly moved the vase back to its first shelf.

It was hard to see her life right up to its edges. I knew she didn’t have anything else. I worked night shifts but started taking afternoons as well, to get away from the constant scraping sounds of her effort—chairs dragged across floors, the rustle of fabrics, the dust of books she’d unearthed from boxes. I knew that part of it was a way to keep busy, to say: Today I will not drink. I will dust. Her life was a series of substitutions. But I couldn’t look at her without feeling I could see right through her.

The bed-and-breakfast was in an old Victorian on Hyde. Getting the job had been easy. “We like your look,” the owner said. She was Gail, a meaty middle-aged matron. When she said “we,” she meant herself and her partner, an elfin woman named Bea who looked like she could fit inside her lover’s armpit. They didn’t ask where I’d gone to school or what I’d studied. They only asked if I knew how to bake, and they didn’t seem to care when I said no.

I took pleasure in setting tables and sweeping crumbs. I felt the entire house as a set of nerve endings. I got uneasy at the sight of an object out of place—a dirty mug on the fireplace or an old tea bag hardening in a mug—and drew a keen satisfaction from its restoration, like the sensation of clasping a necklace. I enjoyed using my hands. I hosed the dishes with hot water and lathered them with lemon soap, scrubbed blisters of jam from the grainy wood. I surveyed the breakfast tables once I’d set them for the next morning: each cup and saucer neatly stacked on glass that gave off the scent of firm, soapy polish.

Tilly didn’t like to see me leave for work. “Leaving already?” she’d ask, even though I left at the same time each day. After a month she got a job of her own. This gave me some relief. Now things were moving forward; I could help.