“Is Dash an eighty-year-old retired cabaret singer?”

“I’m pretty sure not.”

“Then no Dash here, kiddo. This is a nursing home.”

“Do any blind people live here?” I asked.

“Why?”

I handed him my card. “Because I would like to read to them. For my college applications. Also, I like old people.”

“How generous of you. I’ll hold on to this just in case I hear of anything.” He glanced down at my card. “Nice to meet you, Lily Dogwalker.”

“You too!”

I crossed the street to the third building. A doorman was outside shoveling snow. “Hi! Would you like some help?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Union rules. No help.”

I gave the doorman one of the Starbucks gift cards one of my dog-walking clients had gifted me with before Christmas. “Have a coffee on me on your break, sir.”

“Thanks! Now whaddya want?”

“Does Dash live here?”

“Dash. Dash who?”

“Not sure of his last name. Teenage boy, on the tall side, dreamy blue eyes. Peacoat. Shops at the Strand near here, so maybe he carries bags from there?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Seems sort of … snarly?”

“Oh, that kid. Sure. Lives at that building.”

The doorman pointed to the building on the fourth corner.

I walked over to that building.

“Hi,” I said to the doorman, who was reading a copy of the New Yorker. “Dash lives here, right?”

The doorman looked up from his magazine. “16E? Mom’s a shrink?”

“Right,” I said. Sure, why not?

The doorman tucked the magazine into a drawer. “He went out about an hour ago. Want to leave a message for him?”

I took a package from my bag. “Could I leave this for him?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I handed the doorman my card also. He glanced at it. “No pets allowed in this building,” he said.

“That’s tragic,” I said.

No wonder Dash was so snarly.

The package I’d left for Dash contained a gift box of English breakfast tea and the red notebook.

Dear Dash:

Meeting you through this notebook meant a lot to me. Especially this Christmas.

But I know I botched its magic, big-time.

I’m so sorry.

What I’m sorry about is not being a tipsy idiot when you found me. I’m sorry about that, obviously, but more sorry that my stupidity caused us to lose a great opportunity. I don’t imagine you would have met me and fallen crazy in love with me, but I would like to think that if you’d had a chance to meet me under different circumstances, something just as nice could have happened.

We could have become friends.

Game over. I get that.

But if you ever want a (sober) new Lily friend, I’m your girl.

I feel like you may be a special and kind person. And I would like to make it my business to know special and kind people. Especially if they are boys my age.

Thank you for being a real stapler of a hero guy.

There is a snowman in the garden at my great-aunt’s house who’d like to meet you. If you dare.

Regards,
Lily

PS I’m not going to hold it against you that you associate with Edgar Thibaud, and I hope you will extend me the same courtesy.

Below my dare, I’d stapled my Lily Dogwalker business card. I didn’t hold out hope that Dash would take me up on the snowman offer, or try to call me ever, but I figured if he did want to get directly in touch with me again, the least I could do was not make him go through several of my relatives.

After my last entry in the notebook, I’d cut out and pasted a section of a page I’d photocopied of the Contemporary Poets reference book in Mrs. Basil E.’s parlor library.

Strand, Mark

[Blah blah blah biographical information, crossed out with Sharpie pen.]

We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it,
As though we had written it.

fifteen

–Dash–

December 28th

I woke up next to Sofia. At some point in the night, she’d turned away from me, but she’d let one hand linger, reaching back to rest on my own hand. A border of sunlight ringed the curtains of the hotel room, signaling morning. I felt her hand, felt our breathing. I felt lucky, grateful. The sound of traffic climbed from the street, mingled with parts of conversations. I looked at her neck, brushed back her hair to kiss it. She stirred. I wondered.

Our clothes had stayed on the whole time. We’d cuddled together, looking not for sex but comfort. We’d sailed to sleep together, with more ease than I ever would have imagined.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

POUND. POUND. POUND.

The door. Three pounds on the door.

A man’s voice. “Sofia? ¿Estás lista?”

Her hand grabbed for mine. Squeezed.

“Un minuto, Papa!” she called out.

As it happened, the maids at the Belvedere did a fine job of vacuuming, so when I hid under the bed, I was attacked by neither rats nor dust mites. Just the general fear of a vengeful father storming into a hotel room.

More knocking. Sofia headed for the door.

Too late, I realized my shoes were lollygagging on the floor about an arm’s length away from me. As Sofia’s father lumbered in—he was a sizable man, roughly the shape of a school bus—I made a desperate grab, only to have my hand kicked away by Sofia’s bare feet. My shoes followed in quick succession—Sofia shooting them right into my face. I let out an involuntary cry of startled pain, which Sofia covered by telling her father loudly that she was almost ready to go.

If he noticed she was wearing yesterday’s clothes, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he came closer and closer to the bed. Before I could maneuver, he let his weight fall onto the mattress, and I found myself cheek to cheek with the indentation of his sizable behind.

“¿Dónde está Mamá?” Sofia asked. When she bent down to pick up her shoes, she shot me a stern Stay put look. As if I had a choice. I was basically pinned to the floor, my forehead bleeding from being attacked by my own shoe.

“En el vestíbulo, esperando.”

“¿Por qué no vas a esperar con ella? Bajo en un segundo.”

I wasn’t really following this exchange, just praying it would be a quick one. Then the weight above me shifted, and Sofia’s father was once more floor-based. Suddenly the space under the bed seemed the size of a downtown loft. I wanted to roll over, just because I could.

As soon as her father was gone, Sofia climbed under the bed with me.

“That was a fun wake-up call, was it not?” she asked. Then she pushed back my hair to look at my forehead. “God, you’re hurt. How did that happen?”

“Bumped my head,” I replied. “It’s an occupational hazard, if your occupation happens to be sleeping over with ex-girlfriends.”

“Does that occupation pay well?”

“Clearly.” I made a move to kiss her—and hit my head again.

“Come on,” Sofia said, starting to slide away from me. “Let’s get you somewhere safer.”

I stomach-crawled out after her, then went to the sink to clean myself up. Meanwhile, in the other room, she changed her clothes. I sneaked peeks in the closet mirror.

“I can see you as well as you can see me,” Sofia pointed out.

“Is that a problem?” I asked.

“Actually,” she said, lifting her shirt over her head, “no.”

I had to remind myself that her father was no doubt waiting for her. Now was not the time for canoodling, no matter how much the canoodling impulse was striking.

A new shirt went on, and Sofia walked over to me, putting her face next to mine in the bathroom mirror reflection.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“It was never this fun when we were actually going out, was it?” she asked.

“I assure you,” I replied, “it was never this fun.”

I knew she was leaving. I knew we were never going to date long-distance. I knew that we wouldn’t have been able to be like this back when we were dating, so there was no use in regretting what hadn’t happened. I suspected that what happens in hotel rooms rarely lasts outside of them. I suspected that when something was a beginning and an ending at the same time, that meant it could only exist in the present.

And still. I wanted more than that.

“Let’s make plans,” I ventured.

And Sofia smiled and said, “No, let’s leave it to chance.”

It was snowing outside, anointing the air with a quiet wonder shared by all passersby. When I got back to my mother’s apartment, I was a mixture of giddy thrill-happiness and muddled gut-confusion—I didn’t want to leave anything regarding Sofia to chance, and at the same time I was enjoying this step away from it. I hummed my way into the bathroom, checked on my shoe-inflicted wound, then headed to the kitchen, where I opened the refrigerator and found myself yogurtless. Quickly I bundled myself up in a striped hat and striped scarf and striped gloves—dressing for snow can be the keenest, most allowable kindergarten throwback—and traipsed down University and through Washington Square Park to the Morton Williams.

It was only on my way back that I encountered the ruffians. I have no knowledge of what I did to provoke them. In fact, I like to believe there was no provocation whatsoever—their target was as arbitrary as their misbehavior was focused.

“The enemy!” one of them cried. I didn’t even have time to shield my bag of yogurts before I was being bombarded by snowballs.

Like dogs and lions, small children can sense fear. The slightest flinch, the slightest disinclination, and they will jump atop you and devour you. Snow was pelting my torso, my legs, my groceries. None of the kids looked familiar—there were nine, maybe ten of them, and they were nine, maybe ten years old. “Attack!” they cried. “There he is!” they shouted, even though I’d made no attempt to hide. “Get ’im!”

Fine, I thought, bending over to scoop up some snow, even though this left my backside ripe for an offensive.

It is not easy to hurl snowballs while holding on to a plastic bag of groceries, so my first few efforts were subpar, missing their mark. The nine maybe ten nine-maybe-ten-year-olds ridiculed me—if I turned to aim at one, four others outflanked me and shot from the sides and the back. I was, in the parlance of an ancient day, cruising for a bruising, and while a more disdainful teenager would have walked away, and a more aggressive teenager would have dropped the bag and kicked some major preteen ass, I kept fighting snowball with snowball, laughing as if Boomer and I were playing a school yard game, flinging my orbs with winter abandon, wishing Sofia were here by my side.…

Until I hit the kid in the eye.

There was no aim involved. I just threw a snowball at him and—pow!—he went down. The other kids unleashed the last of their snowballs and ran to him to see what had happened.

I walked over, too, asking if he was okay. He didn’t look concussed, and his eye was fine. But now vengeance was spreading across the faces of the nine/tens, and it wasn’t a cute little vengeance. Some took out cell phones to take pictures and call their mothers. Others began to reload on snowballs, making sure to create them from patches where the snow mixed with gravel.

I bolted. I ran down Fifth Avenue, skirted onto Eighth Street, hid in an Au Bon Pain until the elementary school mob had passed.

When I got back to my mom’s building, the doorman had a package for me. I thanked him, but decided to wait until I got to the apartment before opening it, because this was the doorman who was notorious for “tithing” the residents by stealing one out of every ten of our magazines and I didn’t want to share any potential goodies.