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Sophie gets through to the restaurant, she is told Max arrived for his reservation, waited an hour and left. That’s too bad. Maybe he tried calling. Sophie was on the line with Hendrik Anderson for, she guesses, a fairly long time. Time is odd today, not quite calculable. All stretched out, but in tiny, sharp, individual moments. She tries him at home. “Ah, Sophie,” he says, annoyance in his voice but also relief. Then his voice darkens. “What’s wrong, what has happened? Something has happened?”
    She hasn’t had to say the words before. This makes a difference, it makes her voice crack. “It’s Phil. I’m sorry to give you bad news, but Phil died in the night.”
    She hears a sharp breath, then courtly old Max’s first words are, “You’re kidding.”
    Kidding? No, she doesn’t think so. Who would kid about such a thing?
    “I’m sorry, Sophie, forgive me, that was a terrible thing to say. Was it an accident? How is Nora?”
    “No, not an accident. Something else, overnight, in his sleep. Nora’s okay, she’s just not up to talking to anyone yet. But we’re really sorry about leaving you to wait in the restaurant. There’s been a lot of confusion.”
    “He hadn’t been ill?”
    “Not as far as anyone knew. Including him.”
    “What a dreadful shock. Dreadful. Should I come, or wait to hear from Nora herself?”
    “I don’t know.” Sophie hears her voice quiver. “I don’t know what anybody should do. The service will probably be the day after tomorrow—can you come for that, do you think?”
    “Of course I can. And you tell Nora that anything she needs me for, I will do.”
    Ah, yes. Nora the widow. “Thanks, Max, I will.”
    Working her way through a brief list of other people who need to be told, Sophie learns that Max is not the only one to whose lips “You’re kidding” leaps. She phones one of Phil’s poker pals, a drinking buddy, a couple of suppliers and most intimate customers and several of his designer friends, establishing a telephone tree in which each person will call others within these various circles, and is disconcerted by how often that’s the first response. “No,” she says over and over, increasingly coldly, “I’m not kidding.”
    Once past that they do better. They’re ashamed. Like Max, they say, “That was stupid, I’m sorry,” and, “Oh no, that’s terrible,” and, “What a shock,” and, “What happened?” and, of course, “How is Nora?” It’s interesting that no one says, “This must be hard on you, Sophie, having to make this kind of call. Are you all right?”
    She is all right. Only tired of repeating the same words, and making clear she is not kidding even one little bit. She is a thirty-three-year-old woman with two political economics degrees and an unfortunate habit of screeching her way up out of nightmares, sometimes waking the household. She has been for four years a bookkeeper, errand-runner, clean-up person for two people who decided to afford such a person. She has kept track of their sales and commissions, their incomes and outgoings, work for any drudge with a gift for arithmetic. She has picked up upholstery and sometimeslumber for Phil, cadmium this and violet that for Nora, along with brushes and glues and needles of various purpose and size. All low-level, obedient grunt work not very open to error, and not requiring personal judgment either, since in the actual selection of paints, fabrics and threads, or of wood of particular grains, Nora and Phil made sure they chose for themselves.
    Sophie has also handled most of their correspondence, generally businesslike but for a time often obscene or threatening. Plus she has picked bags of shit off the doorstep.
    She sends ten per cent of her small wage to that overseas aid agency whose most successful volunteer she was not.
    That’s about it.
    Phil is dead? The more often she’s had to say those words, the more remote they’ve become from the fact: Phil is dead. No