“I only wish I could.”

“You wish you could which?”

“Either.” She sighed, let go of the doorknob, and came back into the room, leaning against a bookcase. “I was hoping to avoid this,” she said. “I thought it would be so much nicer for both of us to just make love and leave it at that.”

“Leave what at what? You lost me.”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, “that’s precisely it. Oh, Bernie, I wish I could go with you Thursday week, but it’s just not on.”

“What else are you doing,” I heard myself say, “that’s so important?”

“Oh, Bernie.”

“Well?”

“You’ll hate me.”

“I won’t hate you.”

“But you will, and I won’t blame you. I mean, it’s so ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“Oh, Bernie,” she said yet again. “Bernie, I’m getting married.”

“‘Oh, by the way, Bernie, I’m getting married Thursday,’” I said. “And my jaw dropped, and by the time I’d picked it up she was out the door and on her way. Can you believe it?”

“I’m beginning to, Bern.”

I suppose she must have been, since she was hearing it for the third time. I’d told her that night, calling her minutes after Lettice crossed my threshold and closed the door gently but firmly behind her. I told her again the following day at lunch. Carolyn’s dog-grooming salon is on East Eleventh Street between University Place and Broadway, just two doors down the street from Barnegat Books, and in the ordinary course of things we lunch together, one of us picking up sandwiches at one of the neighborhood delis and conveying them to the other’s place of business. On this particular day I had bought the sandwiches and we ate them at the Poodle Factory, and between bites I told her the same sad story I’d told her over the phone.

Then, around six, I closed the bookstore and went back to the Poodle Factory, where she was putting the finishing touches on a bichon frise while its owners watched, beaming. “She’s such a darling,” one of them said, while the other wrote out a check. “And you bring out the best in her, Carolyn. I swear you’re a genius.”