It was silly to feel what she was feeling, Elaine told herself. She was forty-nine, too old to be an orphan.

Elaine had just spent another afternoon and evening at her mother's. After four weekends of sorting and packing, they had worked their way down to the basement, the midden where for several decades the family had carted and dumped all artifacts no longer used but of some dubious value. Her mother was paring down; she had sold the house and bought a condo in Durham.

"What about these?" Elaine asked, holding up a pair of cow salt-and-pepper shakers she remembered from her childhood.

Her mother gave them hardly a glance. "Goodwill."

"How about this?" Wrapped in yellowed tissue was a ceramic crèche that had appeared on the front hall table every December for decades.

"Goodwill."

And so on and so on, through boxes of old vacation slides and photo albums, a croquet set, canning jars, souvenir ashtrays and spoon rests, a rock tumbler for polishing agates, high school yearbooks, the linen christening gown she and her brothers had been baptized in, the old brown sleeping bags with deer and ducks on the flannel lining.

And then her father's metal tackle box. Elaine found it in the growing sprawl of To Go items. Each tray was neatly labeled in her father's hand and filled with flies and hooks and flashers, spools of thread and bits of line.

"You're not really thinking of throwing this away?" Elaine urged.

"I can't imagine what I'm going to do with fishing tackle. Somebody else might as well get some good out of it."

"It's not as though you're going into the Witness Protection Program, Mom," Elaine snapped. "You don't have to leave it all behind."

"I'm trying to do you a favor, missy. When I die, you won't have to feel guilty about throwing things away. I only wish my own mother had done this. Do you know I found boxes and boxes of used lightbulbs in the attic? All the filaments burned out. She hadn't thrown out a lightbulb in twenty years."

"There's a difference."

"It's all just stuff," her mother pronounced, and that was that.

So Elaine ended up feeling guilty about the boxes of rescued history she carried to her car at the end of the day. It was mostly sentimental junk; still, her mother's breezy disregard prickled her nerves. She had spent the day trying to be an adult and failing, and now she was tired and grimy. A quick stop at the store, then she was going to go home, make herself a grilled cheese sandwich, take a shower, and go to bed.

And that was when she saw her ex. At that moment, Neil was sailing his cart through the brightly lit produce section, checking a list against the rows of polished and misted fruit, squinting in concentration, his tongue thrust into his cheek. Typically, he was oblivious to everything except the task in front of him. He threw a dozen oranges into a bag and then strode to a pyramid of corn, where he began ripping back husks and tossing the imperfect ears aside.

She noticed others watching him, too. He was still handsome, but not movie-star handsome. In photographs, he might easily be overlooked. But people gravitated to Neil. His confidence was magnetic. He was a pied piper, at the forefront of countless fads that had washed across Eastlake over the years. She had seen it happen again and again. Neil had been the first person in their neighborhood to take up cross training and the first one to throw it over for free weights. Later there was Rollerblading and touring the wine countries by bicycle.

When they were young, Elaine had been afraid he would die of a heart attack before he was thirty and leave her widowed with two small children. She had never known anyone with so much energy. He might get called in on an emergency in the middle of the night, and still see two dozen patients the next day. Then he'd come home, take the edge off with a five-mile run before dinner, and she was the one who was exhausted, having spent the day following a toddler around the house. In his wake, she always felt tired and inferior. Eventually, she had drifted to the rear of the conga line and been replaced by a younger, sturdier model who needed less sleep.

Already, there was a knot forming around the bin of corn.

She didn't feel up to talking to him tonight, so she decided to skip the tomatoes she had come in for and headed toward the frozen desserts aisle instead.

In the first months after the divorce, she had avoided their old restaurants, the drugstore, the dry cleaner, anywhere they might cross paths. She avoided the neighborhood where he'd built a new house, and kept a sharp eye peeled for his BMW and the little red Miata his girlfriend, Nicole, drove. Even so, they lived in a small community and she bumped into him now and again. A year later, she had more or less grown used to it, although she was surprised she hadn't seen his car in the supermarket parking lot.

They were out of Chunky Monkey. She was reaching into the smoking interior of the ice cream case when she heard her name at her back. Neil was behind her, his cart filled to the brim. He looked pleased to see her, although she could tell from the way he furtively appraised the carton of Chocolate Mint in her hand that he was making an effort not to lecture her on fats. He made a generous living replacing arteries.

"What do you know? I never would have picked you out as a night shopper." His smile was broad and innocent.

"How are you, Neil?"

"I'm fine," he said, as always, but there was an unfamiliar hesitancy in his voice. She ignored it. She had her own problems. Besides, she probably already knew his. Their children kept her abreast. Nicole had skipped town back in March and, according to the credit card statements that still came to Neil's house, had returned to California.

"Have you tried this?" he asked. He had moved to the far side of the aisle where the fresh yogurt machine stood. He was filling a Styrofoam tub from the nozzle marked Raspberry Swirl. "This is my favorite flavor. And you don't even have to feel guilty."

"I like my guilty pleasures."

He smiled, good-natured but puzzled. "You don't know what you're missing. I eat this every night. Here, taste." He squirted a little onto a plastic spoon.

"No, thanks."

"C'mon, just a taste." He held out the spoon as though he were trying to tempt a fussy infant.

"I don't like yogurt." Her voice was sharp, and a shopper glanced in their direction.

He blinked, startled. She watched a tide of hurt surprise ripple across his face. And then it was gone.

"Okay." He shrugged and tossed the spoon into a trash receptacle. "But I'm telling you, this stuff is really good." He smiled, forgiving her, then snapped a lid on his container of yogurt and tossed it onto the heap of bagged fruit and vegetables in his cart.

She hadn't seen Neil's car in the supermarket lot because it wasn't there. When she came through the sliding doors with her bag of toilet paper, milk, bread, and tomatoes (she had relented, after all, relinquishing the ice cream), Neil was pacing across the lot, talking into his cell phone. He waved and Elaine tossed him a wave back, but then he began loping toward her.

"Elaine, my car's gone."

"Gone?"

Eventually it came out that he had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition, but as he explained to the policeman when he arrived, he parked the car right at the front door and he was inside for only ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. The officer was courteous, taking down the license and make of the car.

"You can come in tomorrow and file a report. Do you have a way to get home?"

"I've got a load of groceries." Neil gestured to a cart stuffed with bags and abandoned in the dark asphalt sea. "Elaine?"