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“Fine, if you don’t mind it looking like a mud puddle. All right.” She turned to go but when she got to my front door, she paused and looked back at me. “It will stop soon.”

“What? Excuse me?”

She rolled her eyes. “What do you think? It won’t last much longer.”

“I…are you talking about—”

“By the way, the rumors about the secret dog in 3B are false.” She slammed the door behind herself.

I stood there for much too long, staring at it. Had she been talking about the song? The glitter? The hearts? No, she couldn’t have been. She didn’t know about any of it, so how would she know when it was going to stop? And why would it stop? The last time that had started to happen was because Oliver had moved away and we were drifting apart, so the sound had diminished and the glitter had dimmed right along with it.

Was that happening now?

He was working and I didn’t want to bother him with a bunch of texts that probably would have come off as insecure and grasping. Instead, I sat on my mud-colored couch and felt exactly that way, and every once in a while, I went to turn on the water in the sink. The song still came out full-blast and the visual display almost blinded me.

Things were good there.

Mrs. McGlothen must have been talking about something else, something that I didn’t know about or understand, and that was fine. This was all fine. Instead of brooding about her possible witch-ness, I worked on tugging the furniture to the exactly right spots, making the new bed, and then washing the floors where the delivery guys had been walking. While I did that, I also checked for damage, but they had been great. She had nothing to be concerned about…

And that got me thinking about her again. Since Oliver still wasn’t on his way over, I went to the record shop to bother Gramps about Vera for a while and to ask about my possibly supernatural building manager.

“I don’t call her a witch,” he said, “I call her a bi—”

“Ok, ok,” I cut him off. “I know how you feel about Mrs. McGlothen.”

“You can’t believe that story,” he chided, which was basically the same thing that his grandson had said earlier.

“Not really, but why does Vera?”

“She believes all kinds of crazy stuff,” he scoffed. “She thinks there are fairies in the garden behind the apartment building. She thinks that one of the floors is haunted. But she’s a good person,” he told me next. “She’s generous and she likes helping other people.”

“And you like her a lot,” I added and he smiled.

“I like her a whole lot and she makes me happy. I’ve been trying to convince her to let Pene-lope McGlothen know about us but it would mean lots of changes. Vera would move out.”

“You mean, she’d move in with you?” I asked, shocked.

“Why are you so surprised? Why shouldn’t we live together?”

“I think that would be nice,” I answered. I remembered all the pictures in his house of his deceased wife and wondered how Vera would feel about them.

He was thinking along the same lines. “Before she does, maybe you could help me clean up in there. I need to put away a few things, freshen up the rest.”

“You don’t have to put away everything that reminds you of your wife.”

“No, I won’t. It’s not as if I’ll ever forget her, but I could give some pictures to my son, to Frances, and to Oliver. They might like to have them.”

“They would.” Shocking both of us, I hugged him.

“Hey,” he objected, but he hugged me back.

“You could help me, too,” I said when I let him go. “I want to get a car, one that’s a little more modern than the hearse.”

“You’ll never find anything half as stylish,” he promised.

By the time I left, Oliver was telling me that he was on the way. I met him in the lobby and he had stopped to get groceries, because he had an idea for a very elaborate dinner that he wanted to cook.

“You know my kitchen,” I warned. It was small, with not a lot of counter space, and with no dishwasher. “We’ll be doing clean-up for a while.”