George shrugs like it’s not his place to get involved, and he’s right about that.

“What are you and Mitzi going to do?” Kelley asks. “Are you going to open an inn in Lenox?”

George laughs, then winces in pain. “No way. I’d rather eat glass. And Mitzi is all done with innkeeping. She’s been sick of it for a while.”

“She has?” Kelley says. This is news to him. Mitzi has been as gung ho about the inn this year as ever, and as disconsolate about the steady decline in guests. Because Kelley and Mitzi became so involved in their guests’ lives—they once visited the Pipers at their home in Long Beach, California, and they’ve been invited to countless weddings of the guests that became engaged at the inn—it’s hard not to take the vacancies as a personal affront.

“She wants to get trained and certified as a life coach,” George says.

Kelley barks out laughter. A life coach? That’s even funnier than picturing Bart as a milliner! Mitzi needs a life coach! She needs someone to set her straight: running off with George the Santa Claus is a terrible mistake. She should sit tight and stay with Kelley. They can sell the inn; they are going to have to sell the inn if they want to survive financially, and then they can figure out a next step.

The thought of Mitzi becoming trained and certified as a life coach is absurd. She might say that Kelley is belittling her hopes and dreams; she might say he doesn’t believe in her now and, furthermore, never has. Kelley would point to the four-thousand-dollar claw-foot bathtub as antique-porcelain proof that he has believed in her and pursued her every desire all these years.

But, Kelley thinks.

But wouldn’t Mitzi be right, in a way?

Isn’t it true that he never took Mitzi’s career aspirations, her intellect, her personhood, as seriously as he took Margaret’s?

Admit it. Yes.

It’s true. A part of him always thought Mitzi lacked gravitas. Mitzi is ditzy. In the most private, hidden corridors of his mind, Kelley might have thought Mitzi a bit silly. It’s the gold-lamé-jumpsuit-and-disco-ball persona that transmogrified into her crystal-reading-and-herbal-tea-blends-innkeeper persona that he indulges rather than reveres. He indulges her because, decades earlier, when he started dating Mitzi, his primary emotion was gratitude that Mitzi wanted him, Kelley Quinn, and not an exclusive interview with Yasser Arafat.

“Did Mitzi ever tell you how she and I met?” Kelley asks George. “It’s an interesting story.”

“I’d like to hear it,” George says, and Kelley thinks, Wow, George is a pretty evolved man if he doesn’t mind listening to this.

“Are you sure you have time?” Kelley says. “I’m not keeping you from anything?” He wants to ask George where Mitzi is… but he figures that will kill his mood and the conversation, regardless of the answer.

“Not at all,” George says. “Fire away.”

And so, Kelley tells the story of how he first saw Mitzi in Greenwich Village, standing outside the brownstone of Kelley’s brother, Avery, who was dying of AIDS.

“I noticed Mitzi because she was beautiful,” Kelley says.

“Stunning, I’m sure,” George says.

“But I talked to her because she was wearing a T-shirt from the Straight Wharf on Nantucket. You know the Straight Wharf logo, the bluefish?”

“I do, indeed,” George says.

Kelley had asked Mitzi about her connection to Nantucket. He was interested, he said, because he and his ex-wife had taken their kids to the island for a string of summers, and he really loved it.

Mitzi told Kelley that she had been to Nantucket once for a wedding, and now she went for a week every summer and stayed at the Winter Street Inn.

Kelley said he knew of the Winter Street Inn. He had passed it many times on his amblings through town.

They shared their Nantucket favorites—Kelley’s favorite beach was Cisco; Mitzi’s, Steps; Kelley’s favorite bar, 21 Federal; Mitzi’s, the Gazebo.

“The Gazebo?” Kelley said. “That’s a bar for kids in their twenties.”

Mitzi had smiled at Kelley, and he realized that Mitzi was in her twenties, which meant she was ten or fifteen years younger than he. Which meant he had a choice: he could walk away, or he could ask Mitzi out and become a clichéd divorced guy on the brink of forty asking out a twenty-something-year-old.

He walked away. His brother was expecting him upstairs, anyway.

“But then,” Kelley says, “a miraculous thing happened.”

“You bumped into her again?” George guesses.

“Yes,” Kelley says. “At the moment I least expected.”

Avery, Kelley’s brother, died of pneumonia in September of 1992. Mitzi showed up at Avery’s funeral.

“You’re kidding,” George says.

“I wouldn’t kid about something like that,” Kelley says.

“Of course not,” George says. “I’m sorry for the loss of your brother.”

“He was a fine, fine human being,” Kelley says. “One of the finest.” He takes a deep breath, remembering the funeral at Grace Church. The sanctuary had been packed with men—young and old, healthy and sick. It was the early nineties in Greenwich Village; everyone was going through the same thing.

Margaret hadn’t been able to attend the funeral because it was only two months before the election, and she was on the road, following the Clinton campaign.

Kelley remembers seeing Mitzi sitting in the second pew, wearing peach instead of black, which was a welcome respite for the eyes. He knew he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t place where.

“It was she who approached me at the reception,” Kelley says. “She came up to me and said, ‘I met you outside the brownstone. We talked about Nantucket. You like Cisco Beach. I’m Mitzi Kelleher.’ ”

“Wow,” George says. “Lucky you!”

“Turned out she was a childhood friend of Avery’s partner, Marcus. And when I saw her the first time, she had just come from their apartment. She had taken the train up from Philadelphia to lend Marcus moral support.”

“Unbelievable,” George says.

“She was only twenty-four, though,” Kelley says. “But by that point, standing in my brother’s funeral reception when my brother had been only thirty-six himself, I realized life is too short to worry about being thought a cliché. So I asked her out.”