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vintage Beatles tune, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” came over the sound system. Softly. People came here to eat, not listen to music. It was one of Allie’s favorite Beatles numbers, so she leaned back, closed her eyes, and let it play over her mind. And she was thinking of Sam, trying not to cry.
    When Stevie Wonder took over, she opened her tear-clouded eyes and saw that Graham was staring curiously at her from the other side of the restaurant, like a confused terrier.
    Allie nodded to him and he looked away. Not ill at ease, but as if he didn’t want to cause her embarrassment.
    She slid her cool glass to the side and examined the classified columns of the newspapers she’d bought, laying each one flat on the table, not caring about the spreading damp spots from puddles left by her glass.
    She decided to call her ad into the Times. The other ads in their “Apartments to Share” column seemed respectable enough—not placed by creeps or swingers trying to make contact. Abbreviations abounded in the small print: Single white female was, in the lexicon of the classified columns, “SWF.” Also being sought to share “Apt W Pvt Rm” were “Yng Prof’l Fem,” “GWM,” “SBF,” and “SBM prof nSmkr.” Allie took these to mean “Young professional female; gay white male; single black female; and single black male professional, nonsmoker.”
    She decided to make the wording of her ad more economical and change it to read “SWF seeks same.”
    Graham took the order of a middle-aged couple who’d just entered the restaurant, then walked over to Allie. For the first time she noticed that he had an oddly bouncy sort of walk, jaunty, with a lot of spring in his knees. A tall Groucho Marx. He used his sawed-off pencil as a pointer. “Refill on the Pepsi?”
    “No, thanks, I’m going in a minute.”
    He tucked the pencil behind his ear, then thumbed through the torn-off order slips stuck into the cover of his note pad. He laid Allie’s check on the table with practiced precision, as if dealing her a card faceup. “You can pay the cashier up by the door. See you next time, Allie.”
    “Right.” She watched him bustle away, the busy waiter, showing her he wasn’t the sort to get smarmy and make a pest of himself.
    Allie chewed on the crushed ice in her glass for a while, thinking about how life could change so drastically and unexpectedly. A phone call in the night, and the center of her universe had shifted. A simple phone call, and a relentless momentum had taken hold. Everyone’s fate was so precariously balanced, even if people didn’t seem to know it.
    She paid for her lunch and left a tip, nodding to Graham Knox as she pushed open the door to the street. In the bright sunlight outside the restaurant she stood still for a few minutes, as if trying to decide which direction to take.
    Then she walked back to her apartment and phoned in the ad.

8
    Allie’s classified ad appeared in the Wednesday Times. Seated in bright sunlight at her kitchen table, steaming coffee cup before her, she read it to make sure it was worded correctly, then found herself scanning the news. The city’s murder rate was up (a bloodless statistic listed along with the birth and divorce rates and per capita income). A woman’s body had been found in her apartment, dismembered and decomposed. Yesterday a man’s body had been discovered hidden in the bushes in Central Park, only a few hundred feet from Fifth Avenue. Someone had struck him in the back of the head with a sharp rock, perhaps during sexual intercourse, and severed his hands. New York was a tumult of souls seeking fulfillment bright and dark, where sanity and madness converged often and sometimes violently. Allie grimaced. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.
    The rest of that week her phone rang almost continuously. Most of the people who answered her ad were eliminated almost immediately by the amount of rent, or the apartment’s precise