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nothing.”
    It was dusk. The windows glowed. She moved from the refrigerator to the microwave, defrosting meat. She held the phone to her ear.
    â€œTell me what you used to tell me,” he said. “After.”
    Her heart jumped. “What are you talking about?”
    â€œYou know.”
    She remembered when she was eighteen years old and lying naked beside him, the experience of love so new that she felt she had been taken apart and reassembled. She closed her eyes and spoke to him, a soft, obscene endearment.
    â€œSay it again,” he whispered.
    She did. The moment was clear and full.
    â€œYou say it,” she said.
    He said the word to her. She closed her eyes and breathed.
    â€œThank you,” she said, solemnly.
    She was frightened. The kitchen looked drained of light.
    â€œI have to go,” she said.
    â€œWait,” he said.
    She clutched the phone and listened to his breath.
    â€œLet me get you a deal,” he said, softly.
    She laughed. Hearing this, a business offer, after she spoke to him the way she had twenty years before, was so absurd it was a relief. “Oh, right,” she said.
    â€œGrab what you can,” he whispered. “Just a little money down. Five thousand. Investment in the future.”
    She barely heard him. She thought of herself, her family standing on a cliff together looking at a sunset. Her guilt at speaking to Vance so intimately made her want to buy them something. A plot of land.
    â€œI can even take credit cards,” he said.
    She read him her Visa number, slowly, and he wrote it down.
    â€œThank you,” he said. “You’ve made the right decision. Vance will call back in a couple days.” He hung up.
    T WO DAYS PASSED, THEN THREE. S HE DID NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT HER sudden purchase of a beachfront lot. She picked up her phone quickly whenever it rang. She had been so captivated by the idea of her family and the sunset, and the idea of this, a promise, a deal, she had not considered the obvious: they didn’t have an extra five thousand dollars.
    A week went by.
    She did not hear from Warren Vance. The credit card bill arrived. She had allegedly purchased $548 worth of gourmet steaks from Wisconsin, $1,234 worth of airline tickets via Orbitz, and $3,284 worth of watches at Cartier.
    She stood, trembling, reading his longings. Then she tried to call him, but the number was dead.
    The next day, she told the babysitter to stay late and sped out to his office. The sky was blue and empty of clouds. She drove too fast, past the palm trees, the superstores, the blue-silver chaparral on the golden hills, the giant parking lots—they were all bleached by the white light, as though they had all, in some crucial way, been imagined, and she gripped the steering wheel with the same fierceness she had when she had come back from the reunion.
    She turned the car into the parking lot where his office had been. A couple young, bulky men were carrying mattresses into his office. She ran toward them.
    â€œWhere’s Vance’s Real Estate?” she asked.
    â€œThis here’s Ed’s Beds. No one here by that name.”
    Panic fluttered through her. She ran into the Subway outlet. Margie was at the register, her hair now arranged in a net.
    â€œWhere’s Warren Vance?” Anna asked.
    Margie’s eyes flashed, as though the name woke her up. “The fucking jerk. He said he’d give me forty bucks for saying I was his secretary, bringing coffee, smiling, et cetera, and then one day he didn’t show. Where is he? Do you know?”
    Anna rushed out of the store into the parking lot. The sky was so bright and hot her eyelids hurt. She started to type a number into her cell phone; then she stopped. She stood under the hard blue sky and watched the workmen bring in mattresses to Vance’s former office, one mattress after another, and she watched a few customers come in and out of the Subway.
    The phone rang. She