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each in her own way. Margo had stifled sobs, sniffed, and blotted with a real lace-edged handkerchief. I’d nodded and let the tears roll silently.
    â€œIt’s beautiful. Perfect,” I’d rasped when I managed to dig up my voice. “I love it. Lon would have loved . . .”
    She’d held up a hand that halted the sentence and the sentiment. Lon had been evicted from the room. And to be honest, he probably would have hated it. Too cheerful and distracting for a serious novelist who’d struggled with writer’s block toward the end.
    Margo had also wanted to tackle his office, which she’d disparagingly called “the shrine.”
    The dancer in me had balked. My girlfriend had my rhythm all wrong. She wanted me to merengue into the future. Lots of quick steps and no looking back. For me it was two steps forward, one reverse, and an occasional glance over the shoulder.
    She’d trailed a finger over the desk and displayed her gray fingertip. “At least let the cleaning service dust in here. The room looks like it’s covered with the poor man’s ashes. Really, Nora, it’s unhealthy emotionally and physically.”
    So the dust shifted, but I made sure nothing else did. All was as Lon had left it before he’d headed to San Francisco and never come back. All was as it would be.
    I saw as I entered the lavender master bedroom that the cleaning service had been by earlier in the day to get the house ready for our arrival. A silver-wrapped chocolate kiss had been left on my pillow, Meryem Haydar’s personal touch. Merry worked for Clean on Board whenever school was out—and when she wasn’t giving her mother grief by getting into some kind of trouble. Emine, my friend and off-season manager at We Got Rhythm, worried endlessly about her fifteen-year-old rebel, butI thought that behind Merry’s pink-tipped spiked hair, the eyebrow ring, the fake tattoos, the fresh mouth, the curfew breaking and smoking on the sly, the tantrums at home, the bad behavior at school, the acting up and acting out, there was a kid with a good heart.
    Merry had left the balcony window open to let the sea air freshen the room. I moved to it and slid back the sheers to allow the moonlight to flood in. And maybe thoughts of Lon.
    The first time he’d wafted through that window was a week after his memorial service. Dressed in his favorite seersucker suit and striped bow tie, he’d stood silently—for a minute? an hour?—before blowing me a kiss and evaporating. A few nights later, he’d wakened me by stroking my back from his perch on my—
our
bed. That rattled me so hard I’d called a shrink friend at Poplar Grove, the psychiatric hospital where I worked part-time. Was I losing it?
    â€œYou were probably in that fugue state between sleep and wakefulness where the mind plays tricks,” Josh Zimmerman had calmly stated. “You needed comfort—it gave you comfort. The literature is full of such benign hallucinations. These self-designed spirits take off when they’re no longer relevant. Not to worry.”
    My husband’s silent apparition dropped in three more times. On the last visit he wore his ratty tartan robe and scuffed slippers. There had been no command performance since, so maybe he’d been absorbed into eternity, which made me sad. Though sometimes I caught the unmistakable scent of the aftershave he’d said smelled like California at dawn—woodsy-citrusy.
    Tonight I was hoping for a visit or at least a little telepathic advice about what to do if the financial roof at Vintage caved in. Lon had been one of that rare breed, a writer with his feet on the ground. I was the dancer who stepped on her own toes moving forward. I said a prayer in my best New York accent to Saint Anthony, finder of lost things. “Yo, Tony! Looking for Lon down here.” And when that didn’t work, I sent out a personal