I went over to Roz’s apartment with Smacko, because she was going to be taking care of him while I was in Switzerland. She was getting out of her car in the shade of a maple tree. She’d just come back from Red Leaf, a vegetable store out near Exeter. She lowered her head to the grocery bag she held and she breathed in. She said, “Don’t you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables?”

I leaned and smelled inside the bag. “Yes, I like it very much,” I said. Trying to stay on an even keel but feeling a lot of love for her and wanting to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.

She stood, smiling, waiting for me to say something more. I handed her the beads, wrapped droopily in tissue. “Just something I strung for you, don’t open it now.”

She thanked me, and then she tilted her face up and I kissed her quickly, pretend-perfunctorily. “Good luck in Switzerland,” she said.

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist