“I am sorry,” said Emma. “This all just feels so unreal and so strange that I hardly know what’s going on in my mind right now.”

“I’ll tell you what happened if you like,” he said. “It’s not a secret. Lulu asked me once before, and I didn’t feel like talking about it then, but if you’re really interested, I could tell you now.”

“You don’t have to,” said Emma. “I’m really sorry. I feel terrible now.”

“Don’t,” he said. He smiled his kind smile at her. “It’s not like we have too much else that’s pleasant to think about, right? Okay, here’s my story.” He reached to pick a couple of tiles from his shelf, sat back in his chair, and began to examine them.

“I’ve always been what I guess you could call a dreamer,” he said then, slowly. “I come from a family of them. Both of my parents were college professors, and I guess we all three of us pretty much tended to live inside our heads. I remember bringing a friend home from high school once for dinner, and afterwards he asked me kind of strangely, ‘Are your parents, you know, okay?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I said, because they seemed okay to me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’re nice enough people and everything. But … do they always sit at opposite sides of the table reading books to themselves through dinner?’ First time I’d realized there was anything strange about it. We were a happy family, though. We used to make each other laugh, and my parents were very happily married—they both died within a year of each other, which they say is a sign of a great love. That’s when I found out about hospital waiting rooms …

“When I grew up, there was never any question but that I should become an academic, too. So that’s what I did. Went east to get my degree, bounced around the Midwest for a while, and then ended up back in Los Angeles again, partly because my dad had gone, and my mom’s health was starting to fail, and I wanted to be around for her. I was able to read to her during the last few days of her life, I’ll always be happy about that. Funny thing, she was a brilliant woman, spoke multiple languages, able to read Plato in the original, had once translated Macbeth into Latin just for fun—and what did she want to have read to her on her deathbed? Anne of Green Gables. She was no literary snob, my mom, I’ll say that for her.

“Well, she died, we had the funeral, I did a good bit of crying, and then life started to begin again. And one evening, I was at a barbecue at a friend’s house and there was a girl there who was an actress. And we started talking and she seemed to like me, and then we started dating, and I figured out that I really liked her a good deal—she was blond and sweet and prettier than any other girl I’d ever dated—so one day I took it into my head to ask her to marry me, and what do you know, she said yes. So we did, and we were very happy at first. We made each other laugh the way my parents had; we were young, and, God, she was pretty.” He stopped for a moment, and looked absent, as if remembering. “We were very happy indeed,” he said then. “And for a while I thought life just couldn’t get any better.”