Anyway, I thought. I thought long and hard. I remembered the longest conversation we had had. It was about two months ago, when it first started getting cold. She had been wearing a scarf the day before. It was a wonderful scarf, definitely hand knitted—or crocheted, I could never tell the difference—and it had each color of the rainbow on it. Even indigo, which, by some act of the Devil, is apparently no longer officially a color in the rainbow.

The next day, she came onto the bus as usual. She stopped, however, when she got up the steps.

“Hey, Arnie,” she said, and pointed to her usual seat. “Did I happen to leave a scarf here yesterday?”

“Nope,” I told her, shaking my head, “I didn’t see it.”

She sighed and went back to her seat, looking around on the floor.

“Sorry,” I added.

I had lied, of course. She had left it on the bus. It was sitting in her seat when she got off. But I kept
it. I picked it up when I parked at the end of the day and I wrapped it around my neck and I walked to my car.