If you are not my wife, I texted, then who are you?

Were you aware that you can make enough money to pay your mortgage, she texted back, by searching the internet for rich assholes who are too busy to procrastinate? I keep the best results for myself.

What are some of your searches?

How to avoid rectal prolapse. Names for fruit in foreign languages. Words in which the word “wild” is contained. How to hire a clown. Trauma and brain chemistry. The most famous great ape. Guilt from lying to a dementia patient. If you are in an airplane and it crashes, will you feel pain at impact?

Famous great apes, please.

You’ll have to pay.

Happy to pay for premium great ape information.

Or you could tell me who you are.

I am a realtor to the damned.

When we beheld the oil paintings of teeth with sexy ladies—models leaning on fillings as on the hoods of cars, chanteuses in sequined gowns draped on the lunar landscapes of crowns—I asked my wife, “What the fuck?”

“This was a psychopath,” she replied.

“Should we check under the floor for bodies?”

“Knock yourself out, but you know how I feel about mouths. Dentists should be forbidden from putting illustrations of smiling teeth holding toothbrushes on their awnings. Everybody acts like it’s normal, but it would be like if you went to the bathroom in a restaurant and the sign was an overjoyed bladder pissing in a toilet. I have questions. Do the teeth have teeth? Do they floss?”

The paintings were donated to charity, except for the one we kept—our favorite redhead in a red bikini. She hung over our sectional and made an excellent conversation piece for guests. We proposed names: Leonora, Gertrude, Remedios, Sylvia, Eileen. Nothing stuck, so we ended up referring to her as Portrait of a Woman with Second Molar.

In the pantheon of ghosts, there is a veritable pageant of unearthly ladies. Should they be categorized by region? By era? By age? (It is indecorous to query a lady, especially a spectral lady, how old she is.) As the attendant pulled down the white sheet over my wife’s face in the hospital morgue and I confirmed, “Yes, that is her,” I remembered those many brides filled with rage behind their ephemeral veils. But they shouldn’t be summed up merely by the hue of their muslin and lace.

Let’s not be coy, I texted. I’d like to take you out on a date.

How about the Denny’s in Siesta Key?

Denny’s it is. I will treat you to a Denver omelet.

I don’t want to be committed to Denver.

Please, feel free to choose any metropolitan-area omelet that you crave. But before we meet, can you confirm whether or not you are my wife?

Guy, I got a new plan, and my carrier randomly assigned me this number.

As I conducted my test of the taps to determine whether the plumbing was functional in the Reluctant Gambler’s condo, we learned we were in the direct path of the hurricane. The Reluctant Gambler was dubbed the Reluctant Gambler on account of his stacks and stacks of scratch-off lottery tickets that weren’t scratched off. Hurricane Frida had altered course almost impossibly—or quite possibly, in keeping with the capricious habits of hurricanes. My wife and I hid in a walk-in closet with a dialysis machine that was also in hiding. We hoped to wait out the storm the way we endured our open houses: with ghost stories.