“Maybe Basie remembers me,” he said. “I’ll get myself a good spot somewhere. I’ve saved a little money. My, how the old days have gone! You remember what nice times we had? Playing cards up at Cletus’s with old Miranda! Those were the good times, weren’t they? I’ve had a lot of good times and a lot of bad times and I don’t know which is coming up now. You’re taking off too, and that’s what I’d like to be doing but I got to finish out my time. I saw Cletus last week, but he don’t have much time for me now. He’s got a column he’s going to write for some newspaper. He asked me if I’d seen you around, but I’ll tell you, Annie, it’s not the same old Cletus we knew. Nothing’s the same now.”

She was getting ready to go. She had the car checked and the garage mechanic said she might get to Texas without trouble, after that, he didn’t know. She had thought there would be so much to do, but after all, there wasn’t so much. Some of the people she’d known had disappeared; some had died, some had changed.

When she saw Mike Eagle for the last time, he had hardened against her in some odd way. She felt he didn’t like her at all. But just before he left, he handed her a roll of bills. “Just some undeclared Jewish profits,” he said. “God! What’s going to happen to you!” Then he kissed her cheeks, and ran his hand down her arm. “I’m sad,” he said heavily, looking plumper than ever, and awkward, as though he couldn’t feel the edge of his own body. She kissed his olive cheek, tasting the particular smooth, faintly oily quality of his skin. Never again, she told herself. And then, startling them both, she pressed the money he had given her back into his hand.

“No, no. Take it!”

“Help me,” she said. “I don’t want to this time.”

He looked closely at her face, as though examining it for symptoms of physical distress. Then he put the money back in his pocket. “Annie makes a resolution,” he said.

“Don’t make fun.”

“I won’t, not even in memory.”

She spent a few hours with Eva. Theda was there and had bought her a pretty blue cardigan sweater—“In case you get to Lapland.” Eva had made her a lumpy chocolate cake.

But Thomas wasn’t there. “At the sitter’s,” Eva explained. “He’s a little nervous these days when people come. It’s the eye trouble.”

“What eye trouble?” Annie asked.

“I would have thought Max had written you about it,” Eva said with a touch of irony. Annie was startled. Max had told Eva about their correspondence!