Mina Yetner sat in her living room, inspecting the death notices in the Daily News. She got through two full columns before she found someone older than herself. Mina blew on her tea, took a sip, and settled into her comfortable wing chair. In the next column, nestled among dearly departed strangers, she found Angela Quintanilla, a neighbor who lived a few blocks away.

Angela had apparently died two days ago at just seventy-three. After a “courageous battle.” Probably lung cancer. When Mina had last run into Angela in the church parking lot, she’d been puffing away on a cigarette, so bone thin and jittery that it was a miracle she hadn’t shaken right out of her own skin. Mina leaned forward and pulled from the drawer in her coffee table a pen and the spiral notebook that she’d bought years ago up the street at Sparkles Variety. A week after her Henry died, she’d started recording the names of the people she knew who’d taken their leave, beginning with her grandmother, who was the first dead person she’d known. Now four pages of the notebook were filled. Most of the names conjured a memory. A face. Sometimes a voice. Sometimes nothing—those especially upset her. Forgetting and being forgotten terrified Mina almost more than death.

Mina found lists calming, even this one. These days she couldn’t live without them. Some mornings she’d pick up her toothbrush to brush her teeth and realize it was already wet. She kept her Lipitor
in a little plastic pillbox with compartments for each day of the week, though sometimes she had to check the newspaper to be sure what day it was.

Now she started a new page in the notebook. At the top she wrote the number 151, Angela’s name, and the date, then she opened the drawer to tuck the notebook back in. There, in the bottom of the
drawer, were her sister Annabelle’s glasses. Mina picked them up.

The narrow white plastic frames had seemed so avant-garde back in the 1960s when Annabelle had decided she needed a new look. She’d worn them every day since. It was probably time—good
heavens, past time—to throw them away, along with Annabelle’s long nightgowns, flowered cotton with lovely lace collars that she used to order from the Nordstrom catalog. Mina preferred short gowns that didn’t get all twisted around her legs when she turned in her sleep.

It was odd, the things one could and couldn’t throw away. She’d kept Henry’s New York Yankees cap, the one he’d worn to Game 5 of the 1956 World Series when Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in Yankee Stadium, and she wasn’t even a baseball fan.

And then there were the things you had no choice but to carry with you. She touched the side of her face, feeling the scar, raised numb flesh that started at her cheekbone and ran down the side of
her neck, across her shoulder blade, and down into the small of her back. Mina tucked Annabelle’s glasses back into the drawer along with her catalog of the dead. She picked up her cane and stood carefully.

What she really didn’t need was to fall again. She already had one titanium hip, and she had no intention of going for a pair. She knew too many people who went into a hospital for a so-called
routine procedure and came out dead.

She carried her tea outside to the narrow covered porch that stretched across the back of the house. After an icy, miserable winter and a soggy spring, it was finally warm and dry enough to sit outside. Her unreplaced hip ached, and the old porch glider screeched an appropriate accompaniment as Mina settled into the flowered cotton cushions she’d sewn herself. She took off her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose, and the world around her turned to a blur. She was legally blind without her glasses, but she’d been secretly relieved when the doctor told her she was far too myopic for that laser surgery everyone talked about.

“Oh, shush up,” she said when Ivory gave a plaintive mew from inside the storm door. “You know you’re not allowed out here.”

She put her glasses back on, and the porch and the marsh beyond snapped into focus. Mina rocked gently, taking in the view from Higgs Point, across the East River and Long Island Sound, and on to the Manhattan skyline. As a little girl, she’d watched from this same spot behind the house where she’d lived all her life as, one after the other, Manhattan’s skyscrapers had gone up. When the Chrysler Building poked its needle nose into the sky, she’d imagined that her bedroom was in the topmost floor of its glittering tiara. Then up went the Empire State, taller and without all that frippery at the top. It had been a dream come true when Mina, single “still” (as her mother so
often reminded her) and just out of school, got her first job there. Mina remembered wearing a straight skirt with a kick pleat, a peplum jacket, a crisp white collared shirt, and a broad-brimmed
lady’s fedora that dipped down in the front and back, thinking that was all it took to make her look exactly like Ingrid Bergman. Movies, the war, and where you could find cheap booze were all anyone talked about in those days.

Two years later, the dream turned into a nightmare. For years after, the roar of an airplane engine brought the memory back, full force, and yet there she had been living and there she remained, right in the flight path of LaGuardia Airport. It was only after the long days of even more terrifying silence after 9/11 that the waves of sound as airplanes took off, one after the other, had become reassuring. All is well, all is well, all is well.

Right now, what she heard was a buzz that turned into a whine, too high pitched to be an airplane. Probably Frank Cutler, her across-the-street neighbor. Installing marble countertops or a hot tub. Making a silk purse or . . . what was it they called it these days? Putting lipstick on a pig.

At least he wasn’t rooting around in her trash or practicing his golf swing again. The last time she’d asked him to please, please stop using her marsh as his own personal driving range, he’d grinned at her like she’d cracked a particularly funny joke.

“Your marsh?” he’d said. Then added something under his breath. And when she politely asked him to repeat what he’d said, he told her to turn up her hearing aid. Ha, ha, ha. Mina’s eyesight might be fading, but her hearing was as sharp as it had ever been. The buzz grew louder. Perhaps he was using a band saw. When he got around to adding dormers to the second floor, maybe he’d find the front tooth she’d lost playing under the eaves with Linda McGilvery when they were five years old. Linda, who’d been fat and not all that bright but awfully sweet, and who’d died of leukemia, what, at least forty years ago, though it still seemed impossible to Mina that she could remember so clearly something that happened so long ago. Insidious disease. Mina had been a bridesmaid at Linda’s wedding. Awful dress—The sound morphed into a whinny, and then into whap-whap-whap, yanking Mina from a billow of pink organza. It was a siren, not a saw. And it was growing louder until she knew it had to be right there in her neighborhood. On her street.

As Mina hurried off the porch and up the driveway, the sound cut off. An ambulance was stopped in front of the house next door, its lights flashing a mute beacon. Sandra Ferrante lived in that house,
alone for the past ten years since her daughters moved out. Two dark-suited EMTs jumped out of the ambulance and hurried across grass that hadn’t been mowed in months, pushing their way past front bushes that reached the decaying gutters and nearly met across the front door.

A third EMT—a man in a dark uniform who nodded her way—opened the back doors of the ambulance, unloaded a stretcher, and wheeled it up to the house. Had the poor woman finally managed to kill herself? Because as sure as eggs is eggs, drinking like that was slow suicide.

Mina stood there, hand to her throat, waiting. Remembering the ambulance that had arrived too late for her Henry. It didn’t seem possible that that had been thirty years ago. He’d died in his sleep. By
the time she’d realized anything was wrong, he was stone cold. Still, she’d called frantically for help, as if the medics who arrived could restart him like a car battery. A massive pulmonary embolism, the doctors later told her. Even if he’d suffered it at the hospital, they said, he wouldn’t have survived. That was supposed to make her feel better. Finally Sandra Ferrante was wheeled out. A yellow blanket was mounded over her. Mina found herself drifting closer, trying to overhear.
Was she alive? Coherent?

Sandra lifted her head and looked right at Mina. She raised her hand and signaled to her. Asked the EMT to wait while Mina made her way over.

Up close now, Mina could see that the whites of her neighbor’s watery eyes were tinged yellow, and she could smell the sour tang of sweat and urine mixed with cigarette smoke.

“Please, call Ginger,” Sandra said. Ginger? Then Mina remembered. Ginger was one of the daughters.

Sandra grasped Mina’s hand. Mina gasped. Arthritis made her fingers tender.

“Six four six, one . . .”

Too late, Mina realized Sandra was whispering a phone number. Mina tried to repeat the numbers back, but they wouldn’t stick. The EMT pulled out a notebook, wrote the numbers down, tore out the
page, and handed it to Mina. She’d also written Bx Met Hosp and underlined it. Bronx Metropolitan Hospital.

“Please, tell Ginger,” Sandra said, pulling Mina close. “Don’t let him in until I’m gone.”

He was handsome.

Not that I was really checking anyone out, or that I even looked at guys in that way anymore—married going on ten years now, and
Neil, my youngest, my stepson actually, just off to college. I glanced away, pretending I hadn’t even noticed him. Especially in a bar by myself, no matter how stylish this one was. But in truth I guess I had.

Noticed him. Just a little. Out of the corner of my eye . . .

Longish black hair and kind of dark, smoky eyes. A white V-neck T-shirt under a stylish blazer. Late thirties maybe, around my age, but seemed younger. I would’ve chalked him up as being just a shade too cool—too cool for my type anyway—if it wasn’t that something about him just seemed, I don’t know . . . natural. He sat down a few seats from me at the bar and ordered a Belvedere on the rocks, never looking my way. His watch was a rose-gold chronometer and looked expensive. When he finally did turn my way, shifting his stool to listen to the jazz pianist, his smile was pleasant, not too forward, just enough to acknowledge that there were three empty seats between us, and seemed to say nothing more than How are you tonight? Actually the guy was pretty damn hot!

Truth was, it had been years since I’d been at a bar by myself at night, other than maybe waiting for a girlfriend to come back from the ladies’ room as part of a gals’ night out. And the only reason I even happened to be here was that I’d been in the city all day at this self-publishing seminar, a day after Dave and I had about the biggest fight of our married lives. Which had started out as nothing, of course, as these things usually did: whether or not you had to salt the steaks so heavily—twice, in fact—before putting them on the grill—he having read about it in Food & Wine magazine or something—which somehow managed to morph into how I felt he was always spoiling the kids, who were from Dave’s first marriage:
Amy, who was in Barcelona on her junior year abroad, and Neil, who had taken his car with him as a freshman up at Bates. Which
was actually all just a kind of code, I now realized, for some issues I had with his ex-wife, Joanie. How I felt she was always belittling me; always putting out there that she was the kids’ mother, even though I’d pretty much raised them since they were in grade school, and how I always felt Dave never fully supported me on this.

“She is their mother!” Dave said, pushing away from the table. “Maybe you should just butt out on this, Wendy. Maybe you just
should.”

Then we both said some things I’m sure we regretted.

The rest of the night we barely exchanged a word—Dave shutting himself in the TV room with a hockey game, and me hiding out
in the bedroom with my book. In the morning he was in his car at the crack of dawn, and I had my seminar in New York. We hadn’t
spoken a word all day, which was rare, so I asked my buddy Pam to meet me for a drink and maybe something to eat, just to talk it all through before heading home.

Home was about the last place I wanted to be right now. And here it was, ten after seven, and Pam was texting me that she
was running twenty min late: the usual kid crisis—meaning Steve, her hedge-fund-honcho husband, still hadn’t left the office as promised, and her nanny was with April at dance practice . . .

And me, at the Hotel Kitano bar, a couple of blocks from Grand Central. Taking in the last, relaxing sips of a Patrón Gold
margarita—another thing I rarely did!—one eye on the TV screen above me, which had a muted baseball game or something on, the other doing its best to avoid the eye of Mr. Cutie at the end of the bar. Maybe not looking my 100 percent, knockout best—I mean,
it was just a self-publishing seminar and all—but still not exactly half-bad in an orange cashmere sweater, a black leather skirt, my Prada boots, and my wavy, dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Looking decently toned from the hot-yoga classes I’d been taking, texting back to Pam with a mischievous smile: Better hurry. V. sexy guy @ bar and think he’s abt to make contact. *grin* And giggling inside when she wrote me back: Hands off, hon! Ordered him esp for me!

Then better get your ass here pronto 🙂 I texted back. “Yanks or Red Sox?” I heard someone say.

“Sorry?” I looked up and it was you know who, who definitely had to be Bradley Cooper’s dreamy first cousin or something. Or at
least that’s what the sudden acceleration in my heart rate was telling me.

“Yanks or Red Sox? I see you’re keeping tabs on the game.”

“Oh. Yanks, of course,” I said, a glance to the screen. “Born and bred. South Shore.”

“Sox.” He shrugged apologetically. “South Boston. Okay, Brookline,” he said with a smile, “if you force it out of me.”

I smiled back. He was pretty cute. “Actually I wasn’t even watching. Just waiting for a friend.” I figured I might as well cut this off now. No point in leading him on.

“No worries.” He smiled politely. Like he’s even interested, right? “Who happens to be twenty minutes late!” I blurted, thinking I might have sounded just a bit harsh a moment ago.

“Well, traffic’s nuts out there tonight. Someone must be in town. Is he coming in from anywhere?”

“Yeah.” I laughed. “Park and Sixty-Third!” Then I heard myself add, not sure exactly why, “And it’s a she. Old college friend. Girls’ night out.”

He lifted his drink to me, and his dark eyes smiled gently. “Well, here’s to gridlock, then.”

Mr. Cutie and I shifted around and listened to the pianist. The bar was apparently known for its jazz. It was like the famous lounge at the Carlyle, only in midtown, which was why Pam had chosen it— close to both her place and Grand Central, for me to catch my train. “She’s actually pretty good!” I said, suddenly not minding the thought of Pam stuck in a cab somewhere, at least for a while. Not to mention forgetting my husband, who, for a moment, was a million miles away.

“Donna St. James. She’s one of the best. She used to sing with George Benson and the Marsalis brothers.”

“Oh,” I said. Everyone in the lounge seemed to be clued in to this. “It’s why I stay here when I’m in town. Some of the top names in the business just drop in unannounced. Last time I was here, Sarah Jewel got up and sang.”

“Sarah Jewel?”

“She used to record with Basie back in the day.” He pointed to a stylishly dressed black woman and an older white man at one of the round tables. “That’s Rosie Miller. She used to record with Miles Davis. Maybe she’ll get up later.”

“You’re in the business?” I asked. I mean, he did kind of look the part.

“No. Play a little though. Just for fun. My dad was actually an arranger back in the seventies and eighties. He . . . anyway, I don’t want to bore you with all that,” he said, shrugging and stirring his drink.

I took a sip of mine and caught his gaze. “You’re not boring me at all.”

A couple came in and went to take the two seats that were in between us, so Mr. Cutie picked up his drink and slid deftly around
them, and asked, motioning to the seat next to me, “Do you mind?”

Truth was, I didn’t. I was actually kind of enjoying it. And I did have a rescue plan, if necessary. I checked the time: 7:25. Wherever the hell Pam was!

“So this friend of yours,” he asked with a coy half smile, “is she real or imaginary? Because if she’s imaginary, not to worry. I have several imaginary friends of my own back in Boston. We could set them up.”

“Oh, that would be nice.” I laughed. “But I’m afraid she’s quite real. At least she was this summer. She and her husband were in Spain with me and my . . .”

I was about to say my husband, of course, but something held me back. Though by this time I assumed he had taken note of the ring
on my finger. Still, I couldn’t deny this was fun, sitting there with an attractive man who was paying me a little attention, still reeling from my argument with Dave.

Then he said, “I suspect there’s probably an imaginary husband back at home as well . . .”

“Right now”—I rolled my eyes and replied in a tone that was just a little digging—“I’m kind of wishing he was imaginary!” Then
I shook my head. “That wasn’t nice. Tequila talking. We just had a little row last night. Subject for tonight with friend.”

“Ah. Sorry to hear. Just a newlywed spat, I’m sure,” he said, teasing. This time I was sure he was flirting.

“Yeah, right.” I chortled at the flattery. “Going on ten years.”

“Wow!” His eyes brightened in a way that I could only call admiring. “Well, I hope it’s okay if I say you surely don’t look it! I’m Curtis, by the way.”

I hesitated, thinking maybe I’d let things advance just a bit too far. Though I had to admit I wasn’t exactly minding it. And maybe in a way I was saying to my husband, So see, David, there are consequences to being a big, fat jerk!

“Wendy,” I said back. We shook hands. “But it sure would be nice to know where the hell Pam is. She was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago.” I checked the time on my phone.

“Would it be all right if I order up another of whatever you’re drinking?” He raised his palms defensively. “Purely for the imaginary friend, of course . . .”

“Of course,” I said, playing along. “But no. One more of these and I’ll be up at that piano myself! And trust me, I wasn’t playing with anyone in the eighties . . . Anyway”—I shrugged, deadpan— “she only drinks imaginary vodka.”

Curtis grinned. “I’m acquainted with the bartender. Let me see what I can do.”

My iPhone vibrated. Pam, I was sure, announcing she was pulling up to the hotel now and for me to get a dirty martini going for
her. But instead it read: Wend, I’m so sorry. Just can’t make it tonite. What can I say . . . ? I know u need to talk. Tomorrow work? Tomorrow? Tomorrow didn’t work. I was here. Now. And she was right, I did need to talk. And the last place I wanted to be right now was home. Will call, I wrote back, a little annoyed. I put down the phone. My eyes inevitably fell on Curtis’s. I’d already missed the 7:39.

“Sure, why don’t we do just that?” I nodded about that drink. I’m not sure exactly what made me stay.

Maybe I was still feeling vulnerable from my fight with Dave. Or even a little annoyed at Pam, who had a habit of bagging out when I needed her most. I suppose you could toss in just a bit of undeniable interest in the present company.

Whatever it was, I did.

Knowing Dave was out for the night on business and that it was all just harmless anyway helped as well. And that there was a train every half hour. I could leave anytime I wanted.

We chatted some more, and Curtis said he was a freelance journalist here in town on a story. And I chuckled and told him that I was kind of in the same game too. That I’d actually worked for the Nassau County police in my twenties before going to law school for a year—having signed up after 9/11, after my brother, a NYPD cop himself, was killed—though I was forced to resign after a twelveyear-old boy was killed in a wrongful-death judgment. And that I’d written this novel about my experience, which was actually why I’d been in the city today at a self-publishing conference. That I’d been having a tough time getting it looked at by anyone, and that it likely wasn’t very good anyway.

“Care to read it?” I asked. I tapped the tote bag from my publishing conference. “Been lugging it around all day.”

“I would,” Curtis said, “but I’m afraid it’s not exactly my field.”

“Just joking,” I said. “So what is your field?”

He shrugged. “I’m a bit more into current events.”

I was about to follow up on that when the pianist finished her set. The crowded room gave her a warm round of applause. She got
up and came over to the end of the bar, ordered a Perrier, and to my surprise, when it arrived, lifted it toward Curtis. “All warmed up, sugar.”

Curtis stood up. I looked at him wide-eyed. He shot me a slightly apologetic grin. “I did mention that I played . . .”

“You said a bit, for fun,” I replied.

“Well, you’ll be the judge. Look, I know you have a train to
catch, and I don’t know if you’ll be around when I’m done”—he put
out his hand—“but it was fun to chat with you, if you have to leave.”

“I probably should,” I said, glancing at the time. “It was nice to talk to you as well.”

“And best of luck,” he said, pointing as he backed away, “with that imaginary friend of yours.”

“Right! I’ll be sure to tell her!” I laughed.

He sat down at the piano, and I swiveled around, figuring I’d stick around a couple of minutes to hear how he played. But from the opening chords that rose magically from his fingers, just warming up, it was clear it was me he was playing when he coyly said he only played “a little.”

I was dumbstruck, completely wowed. The guy was a ten! He wasn’t just a dream to look at, and charming too—he played like he was totally at one with the instrument. He had the ease and polish of someone who clearly had been doing this from an early age.
His fingers danced across the keyboard and the sounds rose as if on a cloud, then drifted back to earth as something beautiful. It had been a long time since goose bumps went down my arms over a guy.

Donna St. James leaned over. “You ever hear him before, honey?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“His father arranged a bunch of us back in the day. Sit back. You’re in for a treat.”

I did.

The first thing he played was this sumptuous, bluesy rendition of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” and the handful of
customers who were paying their checks, preparing to leave, started listening. Even the bartender was listening. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Whatever my definition of sexy had been an hour ago, forget it—he was definitely rewriting it for me now.

I didn’t leave.

I just sat there, slowly nursing my margarita, growing more and more intoxicated, but not by the drink. By the time he segued into a sultry version of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” it was as if his soul had risen from that keyboard and knotted itself with mine.

Our eyes came together a couple of times, my smile communicating, Okay, so I’m impressed . . . The twinkle in his eye simply saying he was happy I was still there.

By the time he finished up with Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” goose bumps were dancing up and down my arms with the
rise and fall of his fingers along the keys. With a couple of margaritas in me—and fifteen years from the last time anyone looked at me quite that way—the little, cautioning voice that only a few minutes back was going, Wendy, this is crazy, you don’t do this kind of thing, had gone completely silent.

And when our eyes seemed to touch after his final note and didn’t separate, not for a while, I knew, sure as I knew my own name, that I was about to do something I could never have imagined when I walked into the place an hour before. Something I’d never, ever done before.