“Evan,” she said, “don’t you know me? Have I changed so much? Because you have hardly changed at all.”

But she didn’t say any of that in English. She said it in Lithuanian.

“Minna,” I said. “Minna, is it really you?”

“Of course it is,” she said. “Who else would it be? And it is really you, Evan. I thought you were dead. All these years, Evan, I thought you were dead.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not.”

“I know that, Evan. And in my heart I always knew it. For years and years I waited for that door to open and for you to walk in. And then I stopped waiting, or at least I stopped thinking about it. And then the door opened. And then you walked in.”

“Good thing you didn’t change the lock.”

“Oh, Evan,” she said, and threw her arms around me.

It was very strange. She missed me, of course, after all those years. And I didn’t exactly miss her, because it seemed to me I’d last seen her just two days ago when we had breakfast together. If I missed anyone, it was the eleven-year-old girl I’d scrambled a couple of eggs for, and that little girl was gone, and this, this goddess had taken her place. I’d been a sort of father to that little girl, albeit an unorthodox one. I didn’t know what I was going to be to this grown woman, and I was a little leery of finding out.

“You kept the apartment,” I said. “How did you manage that?”

“I just paid the rent each month, Evan. I bought a money order at the post office, filled it out in your name, and sent it in.”

“How did you get the money?”

“There was some in the apartment. You showed me where you kept cash for emergencies.”

“That couldn’t have lasted very long.”

“And there was your check every month from the government.”

“My disability check, $112 a month.”

“They kept raising it over the years.”

“Really?”

“Cost-of-living increases, I think they called it. Anyway, it’s up to $428 now.”