Tom has shaved off his beard. Corey remembers the last time he did that – traveling for work and needing to get into protective gear, he had to remove the whiskers for the headpiece to seal right. When he returned from that trip, their daughter (then five) didn’t recognize him and freaked out at the stranger walking into their house. That was long ago. So Corey may have failed to recognize her ex even if she’d been looking at oncoming faces.

She isn’t pleased to see him but she can’t miss his motioning to her. He indicates the overhang of the building they had each been about to pass, and she steps out of the rain for a moment.

Tom wants to continue an argument from two nights ago. He’s peeved because Corey hung up on him. He had initiated the call to their old landline number, and she’d tried to keep it pleasant. She thought her conversation was friendly and amusing when she reported to him that the subject of her annual client newsletter was praise of couch potato time. She told Tom she’d finally stopped berating herself for unproductive evenings – she did more than enough from dawn till dusk to earn her downtime without guilt.

“I haven’t experienced any guilt,” Tom said then, “since we broke up.”

That was a boldfaced lie. Tom had been busted (by Corey) abusing their son. She hadn’t known about the punishments the poor kid experienced when at his dad’s, until she witnessed Tom’s out of control rage one afternoon when both parents responded to the school’s complaints. Tom came with them back to Corey’s house, and she had to put her body between her ex and her son to get Tom to stop smacking the boy on the head. Tom had always had anger issues, but no one took them seriously when they involved defacing a detested Bozo record in kindergarten, or yanking the windshield wiper off a jitney bus after the driver honked so loudly at Corey on her bike that she collided with a car. Those events had seemed spirited, or protective, at the time.

Tom had felt plenty of guilt, about that and other deficiencies.

When Corey went quiet after his no-guilt telephone declaration, Tom got riled. He must have sensed her disdain through the phone wires, and clearly he’d been drinking a bit anyway, but he started in with epithets. And Corey listened for a moment. Until she realized that she was voluntarily holding the telephone to her ear. It was like she was complicit in her own verbal abuse. She almost laughed.

Then she removed the phone from the side of her head and set it in its cradle. Tom could call it hanging up if he wanted. For Corey it was plain and simple disconnection.

She has no interest in continuing the guilt or hang-up conversation with Tom. And she has no time. “I can’t deal with you now,” she states. Her damp determined strides brook no argument. Tom lets her go.

She experiences a millisecond of pride. She feels a flash of self-confidence. She enters the bookstore in a relatively happy moment.

And crashes as soon as she sees all the books and all the shoppers. She’s been there hundreds of times, she knows what category of books is shelved where, but at this moment she can’t seem to find anything she seeks.

She takes a deep breath. And another. She decides to ask for help. She approaches the Information Desk.

The customer in front of her is satisfactorily aided in a minute or so. Corey confronts the young man behind the counter. He appears receptive. She tells him she’s looking for a 2006 translation of The Three Musketeers. The e-book sellers don’t mention the translators’ names or the translations’ dates, she explains, and she can’t remember the name of the translator herself. The young man searches his data base but doesn’t come up with anything now in stock.

Next she asks for a book called Altered Genes, Twisted Truth or maybe the other way around. It’s about the dangers of genetically modified food, she says, and as far as she can tell, its publication keeps getting postponed.

The Information clerk can’t add any facts. His resource indicates that the book was published two months ago, but it can’t clue him in on how to acquire it.

This is when Corey begins to leak. Usually when she cries her tears are preceded by other conditions; her eyes will feel hot and swollen, and it’s like a mass develops in her throat that doesn’t make her choke but is unsettling anyway. At the Information Desk, and to Corey’s profound embarrassment, tears stream out of her eyes and straight down her cheeks. Some even drip off her jawline.

And then a movement like a miracle occurs. From every direction, swiftly and silently, it seems like all the employees in the store converge on Corey, protectively, surrounding her and creating a space where she can have time to recover. She stops crying, and starts breathing smoothly, and begins to feel sufficient and clean. Afterward she will say that it was like the end of The Red Balloon, when all the balloons in Paris come to Pascal. But at this moment it’s more like she floats above the scene and sees a Busby Berkeley dance: herself enclosed in people petals, which open like a blossom when she’s ready to fly.