“I’ll call you a cab,” I said.

            
           “No,” she said quickly. “I’m just up the street.” I had not known this. She looked embarrassed. I was embarrassed. She gathered her clothes up off the floor and crept into the bathroom, and I poured what little vodka remained down the drain.

            
           When she reappeared several minutes later and threw the afghan onto the back of the couch. She looked at me thoughtfully, as if she were searching for Sean’s face in mine. I wanted to tell her she wouldn’t find him. That he was there, spread haphazardly across the coffee table, and that I was here. I looked away, at the wall, at the ceiling, at nothing.

            
           “You look like him,” she said. This made me uncomfortable.

            
           “Some people think so, yes.” We stared at each other. I suddenly felt silly standing there in nothing but my plaid boxers. Sean’s girlfriend.

            
           “I don’t know how to deal with it either, Mr. Cohen,” Heather said abruptly, shaking her head, her shoulders rising with a beleaguered sigh. She began to cry again, and then turned quickly and shuffled up the stairs, through the door. I listened to her footsteps on the floor above and then to the front door slamming shut.

            
           For a long while after Heather had gone, I sat with one elbow propped up on the bar, my stare shifting from the cashed joint lying in an ashtray there to the animal heads on the red walls. To dusty hides and vapid, glassy eyes. To an ivory afghan flung across the back of a brown leather couch. To a coffee table and nine pages of loose-leaf paper.            


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