The book The Three Musketeers comes in the mail. It is much larger than we expected. Early the next morning there is a strange, fluffy orange cat on the fire escape looking in the window. Its eyes are wide and frightened.

I’m on the train, traveling alone, with two seats to myself. I have to use the restroom. Without thinking about it carefully, I ask a couple across the aisle if they would please watch my things for me for a moment. Then I take a closer look at them and have second thoughts: they are young, for one thing. Also, they seem very nervous, the guy’s eyes are bloodshot, and the girl has a lot of tattoos. Still, it’s done now. I get up and start moving back. But, as a precaution, I ask a man sitting a few seats back from mine, who is dressed in a suit and looks like a businessman, to please keep an eye on that young couple for me, because I have had to leave my seat for a moment and all my things are on it. I could just go back and retrieve my bag, giving an excuse. In fact, this is suggested by the man, who objects to being put in this position, the position of having to stop what he is doing and watch a young couple who have done nothing wrong, so far, anyway. But I feel it is too awkward to go and get my bag, and even if I went and got my bag, I would still be leaving on my seat a valuable coat.

Lara was supposed to have breakfast with Selin, a friend from middle school who had a long layover in Paris. It was eight thirty, and Lara was frustrated not to have the morning to herself before teaching in the afternoon. She loved the early, luxurious hours when she was free to do anything she wanted, which often meant making coffee and going back to bed to read.

Nineteen miles west of town, Drew’s client Mike and his wife Carol summered in a neighborhood of attractive homes along the meandering Bluebird Creek, formerly Bog Creek. The development was known locally as Snob Hollow. While the occupants were not all snobs, there was little time in the accelerated northern summer for mingling with locals, what Bluebird Creekers called “fraternizing.” But the Khourys were different, self-­consciously inclusive, inviting often inappropriate local guests to their gatherings—­gun nuts, fellow Pickleballers, smiling evangelicals, conspiracy theorists, and cabinetmakers—­despite the likely awkwardness. Mike was fond of saying, “You can learn a lot by observing fish out of water” and “I admire their neolithic lifestyles and the curious pidgin with which they pour out their hearts.” So, Drew decided, he was a snob after all, though proud of his politics.

I’ve always had a problem with introductions. To me, they don’t matter. It’s either you know me or you don’t—you get? If you don’t, the main thing you need to know is that I am a hustler through and through. I’m that guy that gets shit done. Simple. Kick me out of the house at fifteen—a barged-in-on secret behind me, a heartbreak falling into my shin as I walk—and watch me grow some real useful muscles. Watch me learn how to play all the necessary games, good and ungood; watch me learn how to notice red eyes, how to figure out when to squat and bite the road’s shoulder with all my might. Watch me learn why a good knife (and not just any type of good, but the moral-less kind, the fatherlike kind) is necessary when you’re sleeping under a bridge. Just a week after that, watch me swear on my own destiny and insist to the God who made me that I’m bigger than that lesson now; then watch my ori align.

Bea walks into the classroom wearing the clothes she had on the day before. The Teacher understands that this is going to be a bad day. Bea’s hair is uncombed, face unwashed. She arrives precisely twelve seconds late. Not so late that the Teacher has to make a big deal about it. But not on time. Bea walks like a prisoner forcibly escorted, snatching herself along, step by step, then pouring her thin body into the seat. She has no books, no pencil or paper. She drapes herself over the desk and waits for the Teacher to continue or challenge.

“Wait till I turn this off. Now.”

“That noise. Whatever is it?”

“The Hoover was running.”

“How’s that?”

“I said, I was running the vacuum.”

“Not that. Outside. Listen.” Rosie leaned over the banister.

“Oh, it’s the bee, dear.”

“Bee nothing. A thousand woodpeckers working on tin.”

In summer, our neighborhood quiets in phases. The quieting begins in May. Schools give their older kids, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, a month off to prepare for the baccalaureate exams. Following a ritual as old as our parents, the students retreat to residences out of town, to peaceful chalets and cabins away from civilization for communal study and living. As noisily as migrating birds, they return for the state exams in June. Then school ends for the year; a couple of families travel abroad, a few more leave for the mountains. An outsider doesn’t perceive the slow but sure change in the neighborhood’s population until Beirut broils in August.

In early July, our neighbors across the landing, the Masris, left for the mountains. They wouldn’t return from their summer home till late September with its cooling temperatures. That was the summer I was promoted to the apartment’s caretaker, taking over from my brother. My father insisted that I look after the Masri home because he thought that at thirteen, I wasn’t yet behaving as an adult should. I needed to become more responsible. I’d been receiving talking-tos, lectures with full arm waving and hand gestures, every day for a month.

I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart.

My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey, and my landlord said he was around my age. I’d never met him even though his apartment was apparently only twelve minutes away. I lived on the bottom floor of her dilapidated duplex; she lived upstairs. Every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of her feet shuffling across the thin wood floor above me.

I slept with my bedroom windows open, hoping for a breeze to carry in the burned-air smell of the city. Instead, my landlord would wake me up in the morning by pulling aside my curtain and thrusting her hand inside my room, offering me a gift—a spare tomato or a pamphlet about the Hare Krishnas.