My marriage came to an end, with consequences that were almost all beyond my powers of anticipation. One such consequence was that a series of men confided in me about their marriages past or present. These weren’t my old buddies—my old buddies suddenly viewed me with a kind of fear. These were guys with whom I’d had friendly but arm’s-length dealings: a father at my kids’ school; the contractor who was painting my new place; or, to take an astounding case, my dermatologist. Previously his opinions had been restricted to the perils of moles; now he opened up, unprompted, on the pros and cons of monogamy as he’d experienced them. Either these men had heard about my new situation or something about me, some post-apocalyptic air, had led them to sniff it out.
With established friends, my habit was to keep dark marital details to myself. This reticence was intended to protect my reputation, not that of the former spouse. It isn’t estimable to air dirty linen. With my newfound brethren, though, I could say what I liked, as could they. Terrible revelations were batted back and forth in a spirit of rueful one-upmanship. I will not forget one fellow, a cheerful and suffering soul who dodged me ever after, making the confession that when his wife got cancer he’d found himself hoping that she would not survive. (She lived. They’re still married, as far as I know. By God I wish them well.) Even so, truly intimate disclosures were rare. We dealt in war stories and most of all we dealt in theories—in garrulous, alcoholized attempts to formulate generally applicable propositions about happiness, about mankind versus womankind, about litigation, about anything that might help us understand the world or at least make us feel less flummoxed by it. If I discovered a useful law of living, I can’t remember it. The theorists and the warriors vanished forever, save one—Arty. Arty resurfaced.
I was on Ninth Avenue one evening, en route to the subway station. It was late December. Cars bound for the Lincoln Tunnel were backed up and brilliant; a grand artificial star hung over the intersection. A crowd of us was poised to cross the street when Arty appeared at my side. He said, “Is that who I think it is?”
It was a romantic encounter, you could say, and in the emotion of the moment Arty blurted out, “Let’s you and I grab a drink—right now,” and I said, “Let’s do it.” In a significant tone I added, “Let me first get the all-clear.”
My wife—we’re not married, but that’s what I like to call her—was at home with our four-year-old son. I texted her. I showed Arty her response.
“ ‘Enjoy!’ ” he read out. With a grave and direct look, he punched me on the shoulder.
Our catastrophic, weirdly euphoric conferences are now almost a decade behind us. It turns out, however, that an advisory ethos still prevails between me and Arty. We’ve barely taken our seats at the bar when he says, “All is well, my friend, all is well. Life goes on. But there’s something I’d like your opinion on.”
He has a situation on his hands. It concerns Gladys, the former nanny of his two girls.
I befriended Arty when he was a near-client of the company I used to work for, which dealt in educational software. I got to hear a lot about his kids and his ex. Gladys rings no bells.
“Go on,” I say.
Gladys looked after Arty’s girls from when they were newborns until both were in elementary school. Seven years, in all. Over the course of those years she bottle-fed them, changed their diapers, dressed them, cooked for them, let them eat her lunch, picked them up from preschool and kindergarten, sang to them, reprimanded them, got worn out by them. She gave them love, is what it comes down to, Arty tells me. Then she left. The kids didn’t need a nanny anymore. Also, Gladys was pushing sixty and had bad knees: she needed to work with younger, less wayward charges. So she took a job in Chelsea, working for a couple with a baby girl, Billie. It was during the Chelsea job that Arty got divorced and Gladys lost her husband, Roy. Gladys stayed in touch with Arty, dropping by maybe once a year to see Arty’s girls when they were over at his place. The girls’ mother—
“Paloma, right?”
“Yeah,” Arty says, and I can tell, or maybe I’m imagining, that he’s disinclined to repeat the name.
—the girls’ mother had cut off contact with Gladys. Gladys’s calls and messages to her had gone unanswered.
Arty is expecting me to respond with sympathetic disapproval. I don’t respond at all, however. I’m out of practice. Another way to put it might be: I don’t want to hear any more stories about rotten behavior or the battle of the sexes or the woe that is marriage. I’ve moved on. These days I’m all about love’s triumph, adversity overcome, the peak scaled, the clarity after the rain.
“Anyway,” Arty says. Not long after Arty’s divorce, Gladys rang him and asked for a loan—five hundred dollars. “Now, this is a careful, churchgoing woman making twenty bucks an hour, minimum. So I say to her, Gladys, you’re short of money? She tells me it’s the doctors’ bills for Roy. So listen to this: Roy went to the hospital in Brooklyn. He felt sick. They performed some kind of procedure right away and he died under the knife. Sixty-six years of age. A quality guy, by the way. Always had a twinkle in his eye. A carpenter. Then they sent Gladys a bill for a hundred and ten grand.”
“Goddam fucking assholes,” I say.
“Gladys told me nothing about the bill at the time,” Arty says. “Turns out she agreed to a payment plan with the hospital—two hundred and fourteen bucks a month. She tells me she’s been paying it for almost two years. I say to her, Gladys, you should have spoken to me about this. This is nuts. This can’t go on. They should be paying you for what they did to Roy, not the other way around. But Gladys is waiting for her citizenship application to go through, she’s scared of the immigration authorities and she doesn’t want to make trouble. So boom—there goes her retirement money.”
“Gladys is from where?”
“Trinidad,” Arty says. “I lend her the five hundred. I’m not going to see it again, but whatever.”
I think I can tell where this is going. “She doesn’t have children to help her?”
Arty shakes his head. Gladys has a son, Benjamin, who’s in his forties but has never had what you’d call a career. His wife is in the military, so they keep being moved between dead-end Army towns—in Texas, in North Carolina, in New York—and the wife keeps being posted overseas, and basically Benjamin has been the main hands-on parent of their child, a girl. “I went to their wedding,” Arty says. “Out in Flatbush. At this Jamaican church.” Arty says very intently, “I thought Jamaicans were all about carnivals and ganja. I was expecting a party. But this was like a funeral.” He relates that the minister, the proprietor of the church, began the service by criticizing the congregation for being late. “ ‘Tardiness,’ he called it,” Arty says. “Tardiness this, tardiness that.” The minister lectured on this subject for an amazingly long time and with an amazing anger, scolding and admonishing and tyrannizing everybody. “I’m looking around to catch someone’s eye—you know, maybe raise an eyebrow—but they’re all just looking straight ahead with these blank faces. They’re scared. They’re frozen with fear.”
Here I want to interrupt him. I want to talk about myself. I have a whole little riff ready to go. Speaking of nannies, I’d like to say to Arty, I’m a dad all over again, which means I’m back on the school run—which means that every morning I’m reliving the nightmare of failing to put names to faces, and sometimes even faces to functions. I recognize people but can’t properly identify them, these caregivers, moms, dads, receptionists, teachers, and children who have every right and expectation to be identifiable. They call me by my name and my little boy by his—and I can’t reciprocate, no matter how much I’d like to. If there is one thing that’s held me back in life, I want to suggest to Arty, if I have an Achilles’ heel, if I have a chink in my armor, it’s this inability to hold on to names and even, increasingly, faces. It was a real stroke of luck (I’d keep this to myself, of course) that Arty, let alone Paloma, emerged from the fog, or the deep, or the forest, or wherever it is everybody has gone.
“Money,” I say to Arty. “The minister wasn’t happy with his fee. So everybody being late made him really mad.”
Arty points a finger at me, as if he’s very impressed by what I just said. He continues, “When Christmas came around, I gave Gladys another couple of hundred bucks. Not the biggest deal, but not nothing, either.”
Then things began to look up for Gladys. Her citizenship came through, and, when her Chelsea job ended, she felt it was time to retire. She’d turned sixty-five and couldn’t take another New York City winter. She decided to go back to Trinidad, where she hadn’t lived for thirty years.
“Trinidad is where, exactly?”
Arty seems not to have heard me. “So this is what I do,” he says. “I’ve got some cash in a savings account from when we sold that shack on the Shore. Eighteen thousand. I give Gladys a retirement gift of two thousand dollars. As a thank-you and a goodbye and a good luck and a have a nice life. She’s got two brothers down there who’re well-to-do, she’s got her Social Security, it is what it is. I’ve done my bit.”
I want to go home. But Arty bought the first round of beers and might feel stiffed if I took off. Two more, I signal to the bartender, and I extract some bills from a buttock pocket.
To repeat: I took the cash from my pocket—I didn’t take it from my wallet. I had lost my wallet.
It happened like this. We were eating out. Our little son fell asleep in the restaurant and it was my job to shoulder him out of there, fast. We had a Via ride arriving, three blocks away, in two minutes. We had to move. That’s when the loss undoubtedly occurred: in the course of scrambling together our stuff—coats, kids’ books, credit-card receipt, earbuds, scarves, bags, phones, an umbrella—and then hurrying through the rainy and ravening night. The loss did not occur in the restaurant itself—I called them afterward; they’d found nothing—but the conditions of the loss were organized there. Nor did I lose my wallet in the Via. I called the driver the next day and, after the trusty fellow had finally got out of bed in the late afternoon and gone down to his vehicle and reportedly looked around under the seats, I drew a blank. No—my wallet and I became separated either en route to the Via, in the whistling dark, or during the hike from the Via to our front door, a relatively illumined undertaking over a single curb and fifteen feet of sidewalk but one nonetheless involving the same chaos of moving items and bodies from A to B and steaming ahead as quickly as possible and getting out of the rain and into our building A.S.A.P. That is what careful reconstruction of the events established.
Part of the problem was my new winter coat. This coat is from Sweden. It is made for the Gulf of Bothnia and the alleyways of Jokkmokk and the lethal zephyrs of Njörðr. Its core purpose is to limit the extreme and dangerous thermal differential between being indoors and being outdoors in a polar climate zone. The coat must be, and is, a kind of wearable house. This presumably explains why it has fifteen pockets. I need only three pockets—four, at most—and I rely precisely on a scarcity of vestimentary storage options to keep track of the three things that I must have on me at all times: wallet, phone, keys. With few pockets, you have almost no option but to repetitively stow your essentials in the same places. The action becomes systematic and dependable. With a surfeit of pockets—of pouches, cavities, and receptacles—you end up stowing things variably and in effect can mislay things on your person; not to mention that it’s harder to find or discern a pocketed article in a coat that has Nordic quantities of stuffing. Patting yourself down to check that you have everything becomes impractical, unless you want to fumble around like an old fool. Basically, if you’re wearing this particular coat and you’re in a rush, you’re in trouble.
Gladys moved to Trinidad, to the town of San Juan. She settled in a two-bedroom, one-story house that had been split in half to accommodate a tenant. Unfortunately for Gladys, the tenant’s rent went to her two brothers in repayment of the expenses they’d incurred in buying and fixing up the house for Gladys. The brothers ran a construction business and resided as bachelors in a nearby house that had a small swimming pool. There was no prospect of them ever waiving their right to the tenant’s rent. For income, Gladys had her Social Security.
About a month after Gladys left for Trinidad, she rang Arty and asked for a loan of two thousand dollars.
Arty didn’t ask why she needed the loan. Everybody needs two grand, was his thinking. Why should Gladys be any different? She probably needed fifty grand. Life in Trinidad was expensive. No. 1, it was an island. No. 2, it wasn’t the Third World, where ten bucks kept you going for a week. Excluding Mickey Mouse islands, which country had the third-highest G.D.P. per capita in the Americas? Correct: the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Because of oil and gas. At the same time, according to Arty, it wasn’t the First World, either. Public transportation, health care, social services—those kinds of things barely existed. Trinidad was wealthy and modern enough to make things expensive but not poor and traditional enough to make things cheap.
Arty in any case didn’t like to discuss economics or budgeting with Gladys. If you talked with her long enough you’d catch glimpses of this conception of God as this King Midas figure who would make you rich if you gave enough of your money to your church. The more you gave away, the richer you’d get. She also had an unrealistic idea, Arty believed, about how much money he had. The person with the big bucks, including a chunk of Arty’s money, was Paloma. Paloma was the one with the money-making career and the inherited wealth and the child support. But Gladys perceived Arty in terms of his pre-divorce finances and circumstances, even though she’d visited Arty at his Union City apartment, which had once belonged to his parents; and surely she understood that being a public-school vice-principal wasn’t exactly hitting the jackpot.
Anyhow: Arty didn’t have another two K to give Gladys. Well, to be accurate, he did—if he’d written the check, the bank would have honored it. But what was he making back then? Ninety-seven? Ninety-eight? Pretty much what he was making today. Now, it was a good living, sure—but it didn’t put him in the philanthropist bracket. It didn’t exactly put him on easy street. The child support ate up about a third of his income, and then he had to take care of co-op dues, property taxes, commuting costs, utilities, car-lease installments, day-to-day parental expenses, and all the other outflows and overheads that never let up and never lessen. That light at the end of the tunnel? That was the approaching express train of college fees for two daughters.
He had an idea. The idea was this: he would put together a consortium of Gladys’s old families and get each one to set aside a small, reasonable amount—fifty to a hundred bucks a month, say, whatever they were comfortable with—and pay it into Gladys’s retirement fund. It would make no real difference to anyone’s life except Gladys’s.
Arty was quite excited by this idea. He contacted Gladys’s most recent employers, the Chelsea people. They were straightforwardly rich—richer than Arty, that was for sure. He’d heard all about their loft on Fifteenth Street and their place in the Hamptons. The father worked for a bank, the mother for some kind of fashion enterprise; and they had only the one child to provide for, the aforementioned Billie, a photograph of whom Gladys carried in her purse.
He spoke with Billie’s mother, Gertie. It was their first conversation since the phone call, six years before, when he’d recommended Gladys to her. Gertie joyfully exclaimed how great it was to hear Gladys’s name again, as if Gladys had been gone for years and not for a few months. Gertie told Arty how wonderful Gladys was, as if this were news to Arty, and said how much Billie longed to send Gladys a postcard, as if there were some law stopping her. When Arty got around to the subject of the consortium, Gertie said that they would do what they could, of course, but their budget was a dumpster fire. The theme of the budget was one she came back to more than once. Arty said, Great, that’s great, thank you, as if Gertie were at that very moment putting her hand in her pocket. Afterward he texted her Gladys’s phone number and address in Trinidad so that they could get back in touch.
Arty next rang the couple that had preceded him and Paloma as Gladys’s bosses. He spoke first to the husband, who seemed bewildered. Wait a minute, this guy said to Arty, and the wife took the phone. Arty remembered the wife from her recommendation. On that occasion she’d spoken warmly of Gladys, who not only had worked for the family as a nanny but had lived with them at their Westchester home and done housekeeping work. She had described Gladys as, quote, one of the family, even though—as Arty discovered—she couldn’t say which of the islands Gladys was from. This couple was rich, too, but they’d paid Gladys off the books, even after she got her green card. It wasn’t until Gladys started working for Arty and Paloma that she, in her early fifties, finally began to pay Social Security taxes and accrue the benefit thereof.
The Westchester former employer told Arty right away that they couldn’t help Gladys.
Arty had already contacted Paloma, by e-mail. Paloma didn’t answer—which was no surprise; there was still a lot of hostility there—but Arty figured that after a separation of four years his ex-wife, who almost certainly had hundreds of thousands in her checking account, might have got to the point where she could reach out to Gladys even though the request to do so had come from him.
Nobody, not even Billie, reached out to Gladys. It fell to Arty to deposit five hundred dollars in her Chase checking account.
Arty had a hard time believing that people could be that compassionless. There had to have been some mistake. He took one last crack at Gertie. This time Gertie responded very coldly. She told Arty that she didn’t appreciate being harassed. How she and Gladys managed their affairs was none of his business. She warned him that if he phoned again there would be repercussions.
That was five years ago.
Without consulting me, I’d even say surreptitiously, Arty has bought a third round of beers.
“Whoa,” I say.
“Last drink,” Arty says.
I make a show of scratching my face doubtfully.
“I’m nearly done,” Arty says. “Just hear me out.”
At last I recall Arty’s divorce. Yes—it had involved him being involved with a colleague at the school. It was a love affair. He was very insistent on calling it that—a love affair. That’s all I remember about the whole episode.
Arty is grayer these days, a little heavier, too, but otherwise he makes the same impression: bothered, uprooted, in a jam. I wouldn’t say that I’m worried about Arty, because I don’t feel close enough to him to worry; but I’m definitely suspecting that all is not as well as Arty claims. It is my practice to divide humanity along Orbisonian lines: the lonely and the not so lonely. Arty, I sense, falls on the wrong side of the division.
“O.K.,” I say. “Talk to me.”
For five years after Gladys moved to Trinidad, she and Arty continued to speak on the phone: she’d call him, he’d tell her to hang up, and he would call back. She would ask after the two girls, whom—this disconcerted Arty—she began to refer to as her granddaughters. They weren’t Gladys’s granddaughters. They were her former charges, yes, and there was an important bond there. But it wasn’t a grandmother’s bond.
Arty felt manipulated—but so what? Just because Gladys was a little manipulative didn’t extinguish the fact that she was a worthy person for whom Arty had a lot of respect and affection. By nature she was a giver, not a taker. She was a provider. That was the injustice of the situation: that his and Gladys’s relationship had been contaminated by financial considerations, that Gladys’s true nature had been falsified by her material circumstances. This wasn’t Gladys’s fault. She had done hard, valuable work all her life only to discover that retirement, in the advertised sense of putting your feet up and smelling the roses, was beyond her reach. Did Gladys want to be manipulative? Of course not. She wanted to survive.
To boost her income, she took a job in San Juan, as the domestic help for an elderly man, cooking for him and keeping the house straight. For this she got compensation of three U.S. dollars an hour, out of which she had to pay a friend to drive her to work and back. So she was working longer hours than ever for less pay than ever. The old gentleman died after a year or two and that source of income dried up. She was back on Social Security only.
Then her Social Security payments suddenly got smaller—went from six hundred and thirty-seven dollars a month to five hundred and fifteen. Arty looked into it and found that the deduction wasn’t an error but a charge for Medicare. A hundred and twenty-two bucks a month might not sound like a fortune, but it was nineteen per cent of Gladys’s income. As it was, she incurred significant costs to make use of Medicare: during her yearly trip to the U.S. to visit Benjamin and his family, she had to fit in a detour to New York just to see her doctor.
Before her first such trip, Arty asked Gladys what she was doing about her plane ticket. She told Arty that she knew a guy from church (her new church, in Trinidad) who worked at the airport and that this guy could get her a special deal. How much? Arty asked. Eleven hundred dollars, Gladys said. Arty told her to stand by. He went online and instantly found a round-trip ticket from Port of Spain to New York for three hundred and twenty-seven dollars. He bought Gladys the ticket then and there.
From that moment on, Arty was on the hook for Gladys’s plane tickets. It added up. It really did. And it was emotionally trying. The cheap flights that Arty bought usually involved a transfer in Miami or Houston, and Gladys let it be known that she found the stopovers arduous. Because the difference between a non-stop flight and a direct flight could easily be a couple of hundred bucks, Arty had to disappoint her. Likewise, Gladys had preferences about her days of travel, but again Arty could not always accommodate her, because a Tuesday flight was cheaper than a Sunday one, as was a flight that landed late at night rather than at a reasonable hour. And Gladys, who soon enough became an experienced flier, made it a standard request to ask for a special meal and wheelchair assistance—very doable, yes, but it felt demanding to Arty.
Arty would forward the e-tickets to Gladys’s brothers’ company, which had an e-mail address. The brothers never thanked Arty, not that Arty was looking for thanks. In all candor, he had a low opinion of the brothers. They lived in comfort right up the hill from Gladys, yet there was no evidence that they took care of their sister, who had spoken very warmly of them when she lived in America but now never mentioned them. The brothers saw themselves as very devout Christians. If there was one thing Arty had learned, it was that faith cannot conceal character. The brothers could go to church as often as they liked, but in Arty’s book they just weren’t kind people.
Nor was Gladys made to feel especially welcome at Benjamin’s home, where the daughter-in-law, the soldier, ruled; and when Gladys came to New York to see her doctor it was always a struggle to find a place to stay. Her church friends had no room at the inn, or, if they did, they would charge Gladys for the use of a bedroom for a few days. In the end, Arty felt he had no option but to host Gladys at his apartment, even though there was only one bathroom and it was chronically occupied by the girls, who were teen-agers now and opposed to Gladys staying with them, as she did, for about a week, during which time Arty would sleep on the sofa and count down the days until he could get a good night’s rest and not have to worry about walking around his own home in a state of undress or, horror of horrors, encountering Gladys in a state of undress.
What it came down to, per Arty, was that somehow or other he found himself with another dependent. Gladys was seventy years of age. She was in good health. Not to be morbid about it, but her father had lived to be ninety-nine. Arty was looking at another quarter century of supporting Gladys. He’d be in his seventies before he got out from under this burden, assuming he lived that long.
What was he to do?
I swallow what’s left of my pale ale. It’s almost eight o’clock. I really have to be on my way. “You need to go easy on yourself,” I tell my former comrade as I get to my feet. “You didn’t create this situation. You do what you can for this lady, but that’s it. You can’t change the facts of life.”
With some pleasure, I put on my new coat—my parka, as I should call it. It is so warm and snug that I actually look forward to cold days.
“But the thing is,” Arty says, “the thing is, at the end of the day I’m not even talking about the money.”
“I know,” I tell him.
“Tomorrow I’m going to put a couple of hundred bucks in her bank account,” Arty says. “You know what? I’m going to do it with pleasure. It’s Christmas, goddammit. But she’s going to spend the day alone. She’s going to go to church, then go back home, back to her little yard, and watch the TV that’s in the yard, and then go inside and watch the TV that’s inside. She’s going to eat something all by herself. When I call her, she’s going to sound in good spirits, but behind it all she’ll be suffering. This is a gregarious person. This is a jolly, laughing personality. You’d really warm to her if you met her. And she’s going to be all alone for Christmas.”
“She’s lucky to have you,” I say. I’m checking my pockets: my phone is in my zippered left breast pocket and my keys are in my zippered right breast pocket. My wad is in my pants pocket. Do I have my gloves? I do.
“What she really needs, of course, is a companion. I’ve said to her, straight out, Gladys, can’t you find a man to love? But she can’t. She misses Roy too much. And, after all that time in America, the local guys aren’t to her taste. Too rough, too frivolous, always trying to figure out how much money she has. You could say, Well, maybe she should climb down off her high horse. Maybe she should compromise. But that wouldn’t be a fair way to look at it. The thing about Gladys—”
I slap Arty on the shoulder. “I’m hitting the dusty trail.”
“Have you heard,” Arty says to me, dismounting his barstool, “of the Saharan dust phenomenon? Every spring, these huge clouds of dust from the Sahara blow all the way across the Atlantic to Trinidad. Some years worse than others. I never knew about it until Gladys told me. She has asthma. The dust plays havoc with her breathing. She—”
I hug Arty. “Take care,” I say to him, and when I turn away he is still saying stuff. Unless something improbable should happen, these are our adieux.
It was a splendidly chilly evening. All was calm: the cars and buses had returned thousands of workers to homes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the theatregoers and the diners were contentedly watching shows or eating in restaurants. New York was semi-deserted and suspenseful. I decided to walk the thirty blocks home.
I pulled my fur-lined hood over my head. This parka’s cowl is extensive. Through it, one views the world as if from within a cave; and the world is more spectacular and unscientific. So it proved that night—when so many hooded souls walked the streets that one might have thought that an enigmatic, long-hidden order of friars had at last made itself known. At Forty-second Street, snow began to fall in large handsome flakes, each one conveying a small white light to the earth. The falling from the sky of ice crystals is the product of natural rules; but numinous causes and compossibilities now suggested themselves. When the wind forced me to bow my head toward the whitening sidewalk, I fell into an entranced contemplation of the footprints people had trodden into the new snow. I had never been conscious of the remarkable patterns that a shod human makes. I saw that each set of feet left an idiosyncratic, treasurable trace, my own feet included: with every step I took, a boot stamped into snow densely grouped oblongs and polygons, fragments of spirals, and, at the center of all these figures, seemingly exerting an orchestrating or centripetal force, a star. I love our northern snow, and I especially love the brief duration of the soonest, whitest accumulations, when even the frailest branch amasses a matching white branch and the eye is briefly granted, gratis, an immanent element that is wonderful and, on this particular night, appeared to me as nothing less than a sign from a further and better dimension of being. I ecstatically strode home in the storm. An Amundsen, I was received at the front door with cheers.
I took my son to bed; I read to him from the “Frog and Toad” series; and after lights-out we discussed what was on his mind, which is always filled with beautiful misconceptions. Then he was asleep.
Downstairs, my wife was at the kitchen table, unpacking ordered-in Vietnamese food. As we started eating, I asked her if anything had come for me in the mail. It had not, she said with amusement.
My query was amusing because it related to my wallet. It had been missing for three weeks now. During that time I’d desisted not only from buying a new wallet but even from cancelling or replacing my credit cards and my driver’s license and my health-insurance card. My reasoning was that I’d lost a wallet three times previously and twice strangers of good faith had mailed the thing back to me. (The third wallet had disappeared for good, without skulduggery.) As long as nobody was fraudulently using my credit cards—and nobody was—there was a good chance that my wallet and I would be reunited. Obviously, at a certain point that likelihood grew smaller. I’d told my wife I would give it two weeks. That seemed reasonable to me. When two weeks had gone by, I granted the unknown party or parties who might have found my wallet a one-week extension. It was the holiday season, after all. People were unusually busy, and the U.S. Postal Service was busiest of all.
The one-week extension expired that night, as we both knew.
“Well?” she said. “What are you going to do?”
The pho was warm and delicious. I shared this fact with my wife. Regarding the wallet, I told her that I’d wait a little longer. The world would return it.
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