I follow her gaze and see that a man is staring at her and making his way over to us, and behind him is Sammy. If Jessica were a cat, her back would be arched, and she’d be hissing.

“Andrew!” she says, and her face has turned angry. “What in the world are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be on the way to Cooperstown?” She looks around. “And where’s your girlfriend, huh?” She reaches over and puts her hand on Sammy’s arm, protectively. Sammy has a stricken expression on his face; I see him mouthing to her, “It’s fine, Mom, it’s fine.”

The man looks abashed, as though he’s been caught at something, which is exactly how she sounds. Sammy, pushing his mop of too-long hair out of his eyes, scoots out of her range and says, “Easy, Mom. It’s okay. We just wanted to get some food first, and now we’re looking at gloves.”

She turns to her ex. “If I had known, Andrew, that your girlfriend wasn’t going to cook for you, I could have fed him breakfast.”

“It’s fine. We had a nice breakfast down the street. I always like eating in this neighborhood.” Andrew puts his hand on Sammy’s head, which I see Jessica register as some possible violation, and Sammy looks down miserably and kicks at something on the floor.

“So where is she?”

Andrew mumbles something, and then the two of them glare at each other, and then he dips his head, smiles, and steers Sammy over to where they were before, the glove section.

“Good-bye!” she says. “And don’t come home later than you said, okay? We’ve got to stick to the schedule we agreed on, Andrew.” She turns to me. “Let’s get out of here. Do you mind?”

Sammy is giving me an imploring look. Me! Like I could help.

“Of course I don’t mind,” I say. And I smile at her son.

“Sorry that was awkward,” she says. “That man is constitutionally unable to stick to a plan, even if he’s the one who made it.”

“So I’m not the only one processing about an ex,” I say lightly, and am glad when she laughs.

“Gah! No, I’ll be processing this guy for the rest of my life if I’m not careful,” she says.

By the time we get back to Yolk—after threading our way down the street as she points out the best places for beers, for East Asian clothing, for jewelry, for hamburgers, for muffins, for coffee, for everything—it’s somehow become our turn to eat, and we snuggle into a tiny table near the back.

The waiter comes by, a hot-looking guy with a black knit cap and red plastic glasses, and I order a cheese omelet with bacon, coffee, and whole grain toast and grits, and she says she’ll have the same. As soon as he’s moved on, she says: “Okay. So we’ve established that we’re both dealing with exes who are in our faces right now, but I don’t really know the story of you and Noah. Before we get to be best friends, do you want to tell me what happened between you?”

So I haul out the usual story—the wedding, the honeymoon, the walkout, all of it minus the wedding gown dismantlement—and then a waitress comes by and puts two coffees down on the table, and I suddenly know that she has recently broken up with the waiter, and they’ve not been able to put things back together between them, but there’s a guy walking down the street who would be perfect for her. Maybe she should take off her apron and take a few minutes off to go run into him. She could make it look all casual-like. Or maybe the guy will come this way. He needs breakfast. He needs a hug. He needs her.

At the next table, a couple is falling in love. Outside, a golden retriever has run down the sidewalk and is licking the face of a toddler. A toddler who laughs and says, “Mommy, I want doggie!”

My head feels funny. It’s like there’s a golden light spreading over everything, like maple syrup poured on pancakes.

I look up and Jessica is smiling at me quizzically.

“Jessica,” I say. “You need to get back together with Andrew. You do know that, right?”

TWENTY-FOUR

MARNIE

The maple syrup haze stays with me. It’s like I’m moving in some sort of glow-filled fog. All the moments stand out somehow. Everything is brilliant and bright and etched in my brain like it will always stay in my memory. Even when Jessica laughs and assures me that she will not be getting back together with Andrew. No thank you, not now, not ever.

“He. Is. Sleeping. With. Someone. Else,” she informs me icily.

“But you match,” I tell her. “You both match. You don’t see that?”

She laughs. And then she pays the breakfast tab, and we walk back to the house—and along the way she says, “You and Blix with your get-back-together-with-Andrew talk! I’m beginning to see why she wanted you to have this house, so you could take up her song and dance about me and Andrew. Come on, tell me the truth. Did she put you up to this?”

“No,” I say and feel that dazed, shaky sensation again, like the air is wobbling.

“Well,” Jessica says. “I cannot forgive a man who’s been unfaithful! Sorry, but that is a deal breaker, pure and simple. Period. No excuses. No backsies.”

I try to remember exactly what Blix had said about all the people in her crazy little community. Certainly she mentioned Lola and Jessica. But she just said that all of them needed love, and all of them were fearful of embracing it.

But the thing is, I can almost feel her around me just now, feel her thinking that Jessica and Andrew are meant to be together. Maybe that’s what this hazy feeling is about.

“Listen,” I say, “one day I called her up when I was so miserable, when Noah left. And I asked her to do a spell to get us back together. I could tell she didn’t think it was a great idea. She said she’d send some words for me to have a good life, for energy, for love . . .”

“That’s because she probably didn’t think Noah was right for you. Also I can’t imagine her agreeing to manipulate somebody’s path that way.”

“And then—right after that, I lost my job, which sucked, but then I moved back home, and then I fell in love again with Jeremy, my old high school boyfriend. So! That was obviously the spell she sent, right?”

“Well . . . sounds like it.”

“Only now! Well, now I get the news that she passed away and that she left me her house, and I come here, and here’s Noah! He’s back in my life. So . . . well, what I want to know is: Is this the spell? Is this what she intended to happen?”

She stares at me. “Wow. That’s the way this stuff goes. It might be the spell is working. Or not. We don’t know.”

“I like to think I believe in free will.”

“I think Blix would say that you have to trust what makes you happy,” she says. “She was always telling me that: trust joy. That’s free will, isn’t it?”

My phone pings just then with a text message. I’m expecting it to be from Jeremy, but instead it’s from a number I don’t recognize.

Marnie, this is Patrick. Downstairs. Sorry for the crashes last night. Cat knocked vase over, which fell into computer printer, drowning motor. Flashes of light ensued. Sparks. New printer being delivered next Monday. Cat very sorry. Told him he can’t keep getting by on his looks. He’s looking for new apt.

Jessica is watching my face. “Patrick,” I tell her. I smile and type back to him:

Yikes! Just make sure your wallet is safe when he decides to move out.

And he types:

Too late. Wallet already missing, and coincidentally, tuna fish cans are arriving by the boxload.

A few minutes later he writes: By the way, welcome to this house! Blix told me about you. Glad you’re here at last. Hope you like it. It’s crazy but in a good way. I think.

The golden haze is still around me when I get back to Blix’s house, where I find Noah practicing his guitar in the living room, and the haze is still there even when he sees me and wants to tell me again how he helped Blix over to the other side, and how he knew she should have called on the medical professionals, but instead she turned to him—HIM—and how bad it feels that even doing that for her apparently wasn’t enough. He’s clearly been brooding about this all night long, but I am in this haze like nothing I’ve ever been in before, you see, and everything seems so fraught with meaning.

The haze stays with me through the thirty-seven text messages (yes, THIRTY-SEVEN) sent to me by my family members and Jeremy, asking what I’m planning to do, if I’ve listed the house for sale yet, when am I coming home, and by the way, don’t even tell them I like it in Brooklyn because we are not New York people. (That, from my sister, who says she is holding the baby while she types, and she just wishes I could somehow hear the gurgling sounds the baby makes when my sister tells her my name.) Jeremy types over and over again: COME. HOME.