“Now, see, that’s why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.” Dovey’s phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. “The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.”

The entire back wall of the warehouse was packed with books, in shelves that went all the way to the ceiling where no one could possibly get at them. A pear-shaped man with half-glasses and dyed black hair in a ponytail stood in the aisle reading a hefty hardback. Preston had found the children’s books. He shot his mother a pleading look.

“One Book, One Buck,” she read aloud from the sign. “We can take home a couple, but looking’s free.” Preston began pulling books off the shelf like a manic consumer in some sort of stopwatch-driven shopping spree. He and Cordie made a fortress of books and happily dug in.

“My, my,” Dovey said. “You’ve got yourself a couple of little bookworms.”

Little smarties, Dellarobia thought. “I hate that the library closed.”

Dovey gave her an odd look. “The one in Cleary is open. Not that I’ve ever darkened the door. But people say it’s good. I guess with the college here.”

Dellarobia wondered why Cleary had felt off-limits all these years. Enemy territory, as Cub and her in-laws would have it. The presence of the college made them prickly, as if the whole town were given over to the mischief of the privileged. In the 1990s there was supposedly an event where some boys got drunk and rode horses naked on Main Street. And the football rivalry, of course. Cleary High unfailingly beat Feathertown at homecoming. These complaints made her feel foolish and exposed, as if she’d been playing house in a structure whose walls had all blown away.

“Do you know what?” Dovey asked abruptly. “I’ve had it with Facebook. We should invent Buttbook. It’s more honest. You’d have Buttbook Enemies. You would Butt people to inform them you did not wish to be their friends.”

“You could do worse,” Dellarobia proposed. “You could Poop them.”

At the end of the books was a display of luggage large and small, solid and plaid. This is where the kids had found the suitcases, and had put them back, too, nestled against a Mama-bear version, just as Dovey supposed. Most of them looked new. Dellarobia felt bleary again, looking at this unused luggage: the golden anniversary cruise that detoured into the ICU, the honeymoon called off for financial reasons. Every object in this place gave off the howl of someone’s canceled hopes.

Dovey seemed deaf to the chorus. “Remember when we were going to be airline stewardesses?” she asked. “But they don’t actually go anywhere, do they? Fly around all day and end up in the same place, bringing snacks to grumpy people, who needs it?”

Dellarobia thought that sounded exactly like her life.

Preston came galloping toward them with a book, breathless. He opened it to a particular page and asked what it said. “Where’s your sister?” Dellarobia asked.

“Don’t worry, she’s with our books,” he replied.

“You can’t just leave her.” She looked up the way to make sure she could still see Cordie. The place was teeming with unattended children. Preston’s book was an encyclopedia of animals. The objects of his curiosity were a Mollymawk and a Goony Bird, Denizens of the Lonely Seas. Preston accepted this information as if he’d suspected it all along, and turned to another page. “Tasmanian Devil,” she read. “He mates in March and April.” The book had a quaint look about it. She paged back to a section titled: Why Nature Is Important to Your Child. “Herbert Hoover was an outstanding geologist,” she read aloud. “How come scientists don’t run for president anymore?”

“Can I have it, please?” Preston begged.

“It’s kind of old-timey,” Dellarobia warned. She looked for a date: 1952.

“But it’s animals,” Preston argued. “They stay the same!”

“The price is right,” Dovey advised.

“Okay, it’s yours.” Dellarobia wished her son could aspire to more than a bargain-basement science book. Obviously, that’s why most people didn’t shop here. They didn’t want to think of themselves as people who shopped here. But Preston looked thrilled as he ran off to rescue his sister. Down at the end of the books, the pear-shaped man was still reading, halfway through that big book with intent to finish. Maybe he came here daily.

She and Dovey pushed down an aisle of pet items. Birdcages hunkered like skeletons alongside quiescent hamster wheels. Old, crusty aquariums lined a shelf, bricks of emptiness in a wall. The ghosts of all these dead creatures in their former homes made her think of the invisible baby that built her own house. The baby she and Cub had never discussed. That Preston and Cordie might never know about.

“I hate this,” she said to Dovey. “Pet cemetery.”

“Oh, no,” Dovey said. “Those pets just grew up and went away to college.”

“So how come we didn’t do that?”

They came to a halt by a wig stand, wigless: a white Styrofoam bulb the size of a head, notable only for the face drawn on it with colored markers. The portrait was inexpert but extremely detailed, down to the eyelashes and lip liner and well-placed freckles, obviously the handiwork of a young girl. One who had needed a wig. Dellarobia said the word people never wanted to hear: “Cancer.”

She and Dovey stood in silent company with the young artist who no longer needed the wig. For better or for worse. Nothing stays the same, life is defined by a state of flux; that was basic biology. Or so Dellarobia had been told, perhaps too late for it really to sink in. She was an ordinary person. Loss was the enemy.

A gentle tap on her forearm made her jump. “Jeez, Preston!” She put her hand on her chest. “You snuck up on me.”

He looked up at her through his smudged glasses, penitent, hopeful, sure of his next move. All things Preston. He held up the same book, this time open to a horrific close-up. “Magnified face of the common housefly,” she read aloud.

“Cool!” Preston paged ahead. “What are these?”

“Ants,” she read. “Flying.”

“Ants fly?” Dovey and Preston asked at the same time.