“So I’ll bide my time.”

“Why not? Drink some of that famous coffee. Get rained on by some of that famous rain. They have any stamp dealers in Seattle, Keller?”

“There must be. I know there’s one in Tacoma.”

“So go see him,” she said. “Buy some stamps. Enjoy yourself.”

“I collect worldwide, 1840 to 1949, and up to 1952 for British Commonwealth.”

“In other words, the classics,” said the dealer, a square-faced man who was wearing a striped tie with a plaid shirt. “The good stuff.”

“But I’ve been thinking of adding a topic. Baseball.”

“Good topic,” the man said. “Most topics, you get bogged down in all these phony Olympics issues every little stamp-crazy country prints up to sell to collectors. Soccer’s even worse, with the World Cup and all. There’s less of that crap with baseball, on account of it’s not an Olympic sport. I mean, what do they know about baseball in Guinea-Bissau?”

“I was at the game last night,” Keller said.

“Mariners win for a change?”

“Beat the Tarpons.”

“About time.”

“Turnbull went two for four.”

“Turnbull. He on the Mariners?”

“He’s the Tarpons’ DH.”

“They brought in the DH,” the man said, “I lost interest in the game. He went two for four, huh? Am I missing something here? Is that significant?”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s significant,” Keller said, “but that puts him just five hits shy of three thousand, and he needs three home runs to reach the four hundred mark.”

“You never know,” the dealer said. “One of these days, St. Vincent-Grenadines may put his picture on a stamp. Well, what do you say? Do you want to see some baseball topicals?”

Keller shook his head. “I’ll have to give it some more thought,” he said, “before I start a whole new collection. How about Turkey? There’s page after page of early issues where I’ve got nothing but spaces.”