There were. A shoebox of them, in the hall closet. I went and got it, and she held it against her chest, the way Mrs. Tran had held her dumplings, and she walked down the driveway to her car.
At the bottom of the driveway she turned around.
"Your capacitor," she said. "Mr. Okonkwo's deer."
I'd forgotten I was holding it. I went back in and put it in, and the freezer came on with a good clean hum, and when I looked up, her car was gone.
X
The weeks after that went the way weeks go. I'd like to say there was a single moment where everything turned. There wasn't. There were small things, and they added up to something, and I'm still not sure what.
Pauline called on the Monday. She'd heard from Rudy, who'd heard from Peter, who'd apparently come into the restaurant on his own one afternoon and asked to see the walk-in. "I spilled it," she said. "I know I spilled it. You gave me that look and I spilled it anyway. I'm sorry, Wes."
"Don't be," I said. "It needed spilling. It sat too long."
"Gloria would've killed me."
"Gloria," I said, "would have told you to bring soup."
So she did. She sent a quart of pickle soup to Margot's apartment with a note, and Margot texted me a picture of it with no words, just the picture, and I took that as something.
Peter called me the next week and asked if I'd help him with the refrigerator at his parents' cottage. I drove up to Petoskey with him on a Saturday, four hours each way, and the refrigerator turned out to be an expensive built-in with a bad defrost thermostat, a twenty-minute job. He watched me do the whole thing with his hands in his pockets, asking questions. On the drive home he told me his grandfather had made his money in industrial adhesives and that nobody in his family had held a tool in three generations. "I'm an architect," he said, "and I couldn't tell you how to change a fuse." I told him nobody's born knowing. He asked if I'd show him sometime. I said yes.
And then, at the end of October, Philippa Lindqvist called.
She asked if I'd have lunch with her. She asked where I'd like to go. I named a diner on Lorain where I've been eating eggs for thirty years, half expecting her to suggest somewhere else. She didn't.