“Sure,” I said. “Fresh news instead of stale, right?”

“According to this, there’s a map of the closing sites. Can you show me how to get it?” He sounded positively greedy. I was a little scared. He had mentioned Scrooge and Marley; I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, using a spell he didn’t really understand to wake up the brooms.

“You can do it yourself. Just brush the screen with your finger, like this.”

I showed him. At first he brushed too hard and went too far, but he got the knack of it after that. Faster than my dad, actually. He found the right page. “Look at that,” he marveled. “Six hundred stores! You see what I was telling you about the fragility of the . . .” He trailed off, staring at the tiny map. “The south. Most of the closures are in the south. The south is a bellwether, Craig, it almost always . . . I think I need to make a call to New York. The market will be closing soon.” He started to get up. His regular phone was on the other side of the room.

“You can call from this,” I said. “It’s mostly what it’s for.” It was then, anyway. I pushed the phone icon, and the keypad appeared. “Just dial the number you want. Touch the keys with your finger.”

He looked at me, blue eyes bright beneath his shaggy white brows. “I can do that out here in the williwags?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The reception is terrific, thanks to the new tower. You’ve got four bars.”

“Bars?”

“Never mind, just make your call. I’ll leave you alone while you do it, just wave out the window when you’re—”

“No need. This won’t take long, and I don’t need privacy.”

He touched the numbers tentatively, as if he expected to set off an explosion. Then, just as tentatively, he raised the iPhone to his ear, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded encouragingly. He listened, spoke to someone (too loud at first), and then, after a short wait, to someone else. So I was right there when Mr. Harrigan sold all of his Coffee Cow stock, a transaction amounting to who knows how many thousands of dollars.

When he was finished, he figured out how to go back to the home screen. From there he opened Safari again. “Is Forbes on here?”

I checked. It wasn’t. “But if you’re looking for an article from Forbes you already know about, you can probably find it, because someone will have posted it.”

“Posted—?”

“Yeah, and if you want info about something, Safari will search for it. You just have to google it. Look.” I went over to his chair and entered Coffee Cow in the search field. The phone considered, then spewed a number of hits, including the Wall Street Journal article he’d called his broker about.

“Will you look at this,” he marveled. “It’s the Internet.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, thinking Well, duh.

“The worldwide web.”

“Yeah.”

“Which has been around how long?”

You should know this stuff, I thought. You’re a big businessman, you should know this stuff even if you’re retired, because you’re still interested.

“I don’t know exactly how long it’s been around, but people are on it all the time. My dad, my teachers, the cops . . . everyone, really.” More pointedly: “Including your companies, Mr. Harrigan.”

“Ah, but they’re not mine anymore. I do know a little, Craig, as I know a little about various television shows even though I don’t watch television. I have a tendency to skip the technology articles in my newspapers and magazines, because I have no interest. If you wanted to talk bowling alleys or film distribution networks, that would be a different matter. I keep my hand in, so to speak.”

“Yeah, but don’t you see . . . those businesses are using the technology. And if you don’t understand it . . .”

I didn’t know how to finish, at least without straying beyond the bounds of politeness, but it seemed he did. “I will be left behind. That’s what you’re saying.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hey, you’re retired, after all.”

“But I don’t want to be considered a fool,” he said, and rather vehemently. “Do you think Chick Rafferty was surprised when I called and told him to sell Coffee Cow? Not at all, because he’s undoubtedly had half a dozen other major clients pick up the phone and tell him to do the same. Some are no doubt people with inside information. Others, though, just happen to live in New York or New Jersey and get the Journal on the day it’s published and find out that way. Unlike me, stashed away up here in God’s country.”

I again wondered why he’d come to begin with—he certainly had no relatives in town—but this didn’t seem like the time to ask.

“I may have been arrogant.” He brooded on this, then actually smiled. Which was like watching the sun break through heavy cloud cover on a cold day. “I have been arrogant.” He raised the iPhone. “I’m going to keep this after all.”

The first thing that rose to my lips was thank you, which would have been weird. I just said, “Good. I’m glad.”

He glanced at the Seth Thomas on the wall (and then, I was amused to see, checked it against the time on the iPhone). “Why don’t we just read a single chapter today, since we’ve spent so much time talking?”

“Fine with me,” I said, although I would gladly have stayed longer and read two or even three chapters. We were getting near the end of The Octopus by a guy named Frank Norris, and I was anxious to see how things turned out. It was an old-fashioned novel, but full of exciting stuff just the same.

When we finished the shortened session, I watered Mr. Harrigan’s few indoor plants. This was always my last chore of the day, and only took a few minutes. While I did it, I saw him playing with the phone, turning it on and off.

“I suppose if I’m going to use this thing, you better show me how to use it,” he said. “How to keep it from going dead, to start with. The charge is already dropping, I see.”

“You’ll be able to figure most of it out on your own,” I said. “It’s pretty easy. As for charging it, there’s a cord in the box. You just plug it into the wall. I can show you a few other things, if you—”

“Not today,” he said. “Tomorrow, perhaps.”

“Okay.”

“One more question, though. Why could I read that article about Coffee Cow, and look at that map of proposed closing sites?”

The first thing that came to mind was Hillary’s answer about climbing Mount Everest, which we had just read about in school: Because it’s there. But he might have seen that as smartass, which it sort of was. So I said, “I don’t get you.”

“Really? A bright boy like you? Think, Craig, think. I just read something for free that people pay good money for. Even with the Journal subscription rate, which is a good deal cheaper than buying off a newsstand, I pay ninety cents or so an issue. And yet with this . . .” He held up the phone just as thousands of kids would hold theirs up at rock concerts not many years later. “Now do you understand?”

When he put it that way I sure did, but I had no answer. It sounded—