EGGY BEGAN TO pay me visits. She knocked at my door about once a week, and our encounters were quickly ritualized. She would open the lock from her side, and then lead me to the sofa for a talk. I heard about dragons and dinosaurs and a cat named Catty that ran away and never came back and about her Wendy doll, a bad girl, who needed regular punishing. On occasion, she gave in to scatology and unleashed an excited barrage of it into my ear. “The witch.” She paused and breathed hard. “The witch, when she wasn’t looking, ate her broom. It tasted awful. Then she found two people dancing on her hat so she pooped on them, and cooked them up in a sandwich.” This was followed by hoots of laughter. I heard about her nightmares, a monster with “long, biting, angry teeth” that invaded her kindergarten classroom and a windstorm in the garden behind “our house” that crushed the chairs to bits and pulled off her arm, but she put it back. “Mommy works in an office with books,” she said, “but she’s really an artist. Shhh, she’s working. We have to be very, very quiet.” She talked to me again about her father. “My daddy is away in a special place. He took his car there when I was little and he can’t come back anymore. It’s too far.” Eggy wagged her head back and forth and then fluttered her fingers on her chest. “Ahhh!” she wailed, then stopped abruptly and squinted at me. “He’s so tiny now I can’t even see him.”

I recognized the oddness of the friendship. Eglantine had sensed that I was a man who would listen to her. It was my job, after all. As “Dr. Erik,” I served as a worry closet. Worry spelled WRE. At the same time, I was careful to avoid the trap of ad hoc therapy. Eglantine was not my patient.

“DATE!” INGA YELLED. “I’m almost fifty years old, and you want me to date? The word itself is offensive. I have a date. I’m going on a date.” She turned her pale face to me. “I’ve had dates. What I want is a man. My body aches because it’s hardly touched. I’m starting to feel rigid, wooden. But the idea of gussying myself up and having dinner with a stranger just seems awful to me now. How am I going to arrange it anyway? Put an ad in the New York Review of Books?” Inga raised her palms to stop me from speaking. “Six-foot, cranky, hypersensitive, aging, still mourning widowed writer with philosophy degree seeks kind, brilliant man, twenty-five to seventy, to love and be loved.” Near the end of the sentence, she looked down and I saw a liquid gleam in her eyes.

“Oh Inga,” I said, and opened my arms. She fell forward into them but didn’t cry. She let me embrace her for a little while and then pulled away.