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making anything so beautiful, the thought of her so carelessly destroying it angered him.
    “Because I’m so sick of everything being new,” she answered. “Of everything looking new. Aren’t you?”
    Inside the laundromat, Lewis looked up from the floor and into the woman’s eyes, surprised by how easy this was to do. “Because I’m sick of everything being new. I want everything to look and feel old.”
    “Why would you want that?”
    “No. Now it’s my turn.”
    The woman bit her bottom lip and nodded almost imperceptibly.
    “It’s a big one,” Lewis said.
    “I’m ready.”
    “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
    “Because it makes a good story.”
    Lewis did not know how to respond. Both her response and how quickly she gave it were unexpected. “That’s … cruel,” he said finally.
    “You gotta think about it as if you were dead. Because at the end of your life, all you’ve got is the story of it. If you were guaranteed a happy ending, how satisfied would you be? You’d want some drama! Some intrigue! You’d want to feel that you’d struggled and overcome, even if you’d lost.”
    “So death just makes a good ending?”
    “Works every time,” she said. She turned and walked back to her pile of laundry. She carefully folded the last pair of panties. Tucking her basket under her arm, she turned to go. Looking over her shoulder, she caught Lewis’s eye. “Take care,” she said.
    “Oh. Okay.”
    A dryer buzzed. Lewis removed his dress shirts and then loaded them back into the washing machine.
    Just after nine that evening, Lewis wore a very clean dress shirt and a very clean pair of pants as he sat alone in the Palm Room. Although this was his first visit to the hotel bar, Lewis had already fallen in love with it. He loved that the waiters were all middle-aged men wearing white collared shirts and black vests. He loved that their pants were crisply pressed with a crease down the front. He loved that his drinks arrived on napkins stencilled with the hotel’s logo and were garnished with cubed fruit on a red plastic sword.
    But his deepest affection was reserved for the piano player. The black baby grand sat in the exact centre ofthe room. Behind it was a grey-haired man with extremely long fingers. His entire body would lean to the right when he played the higher notes, and he would straighten himself out as the melody took him back to the centre. Lewis found himself involuntarily leaning with him.
    At the conclusion of a rather trill-filled rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema,” the woman from the laundromat sat down at his table.
    Lewis nodded.
    “You’d never know that shirt was brand new,” she said. “Its colour is so dull, and the collar is no longer crisp. It looks like you’ve had it forever.”
    “Shh,” Lewis said, putting his finger to his lips and pointing at the piano player.
    She took the seat beside him instead of the one across from him, and together they watched the pianist work. They did not talk to each other. They ordered drinks between songs but otherwise watched in silence. Lewis found this silence extremely comfortable. The piano player concluded his last set thirty minutes after midnight. At 12:31 a.m. Lewis felt her hand cover his. He did not remove it, and at 12:45 a.m., still without speaking, they left the bar together.
    Once inside the Vice-Regal Suite, Lewis went directly to the mini-bar. He looked down at his feet, which left prints in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Removing a tiny bottle of gin from the fridge, he shook it as he crossed the living room. Uncapping the bottle, Lewis set it on the coffee table in front of her.
    “One dry martini,” he announced and sat down beside her.
    “Are you married?”
    Lewis had just begun to run his hand through her hair, but he stopped. He looked at his left hand, the ring finger of which still carried his wedding band. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “She’s dead.”
    “Did I just break the