All Shots

with which we move as one all of it becomes my most powerful version of prayer and my most reliable source of renewed faith and redemption.
    So, I intended to breeze through Loaves and Fishes. Besides milk, I needed roast beef, some for the sandwich I’d have instead of a real dinner, some for Rowdy’s what-a-good-boy treat after the rally event. Loaves and Fishes, I should mention, is not some little gourmet shop but a big, crowded supermarket with departments for fish, meat, and cheese, its own bakery, a deli, and, of course, the sushi bar where Dr. Ho was reputed to have picked up his, ahem, take-out. It was at the deli counter, near the innocent yet, to my mind, infamous sushi bar that I encountered the other Holly Winter. By “encountered,” I do not mean that I sought her out. On the contrary, if I hadn’t been waiting for the pound of sliced roast beef that I’d asked for, I’d have avoided her by walking away. It was she who accosted me. In fact, I thought for a second that she was going to ram me with her cart, but she brought it to halt and said, “Fancy seeing you here.”
    Ridiculous! Loaves and Fishes is a place where you see everyone. I might as well have been in front of the Coop in Harvard Square. Or, now that I think of it, on the sidewalk on Mass. Ave. in front of Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. But what was her implication? That I belonged in a junk-food warehouse? Or that there was something suspect about my being where she was?
    “Fancy seeing you here, too,” I said.
    “Strange coincidence.”
    “The world is full of coincidences,” I said, without adding anything about my canine-cosmological belief that the apparent meaninglessness of any co-occurrence results from a failure to see what the co-occurring elements actually have in common, namely, dogs. But did I really want to argue with a statistician about probability or correlation? I wouldn’t have minded. My religious beliefs, however, are private. I didn’t feel like sharing them with an infidel.
    “You just so happen to be here, to have my name, and to have found the body of a woman who stole my identity.” Holly Winter, the other one, spoke with the distinctive air of believing herself to possess secret knowledge.
    I was determined not to get in anything even remotely like a shouting match. Almost whispering, I said, “You haven’t been harmed, and I’m tired of your insinuations. I did not steal or try to steal your name or your identity. It happens to be my name, too,” I said. “It’s the one I was born with.”
    As an aside, let me issue a plea: if you give birth to a girl whose last name is going to be Winter, please do not call her Holly. My parents had an excuse: their previous experience in bestowing appellations had consisted exclusively of selecting registered names and call names for golden retrievers.
    “Were you?” I asked Holly Winter. “Born with it?” The effort to keep my voice low was beginning to wear me down.
    “You make it sound like a genetic disease,” she said.
    The comeback made me uncomfortable, sounding as it did like exactly the kind of thing I might have said myself. Glancing at the top of the glass deli counter, I saw that my package of roast beef was ready. The conversation, if you could call it that, was going nowhere. I picked up my package and walked away.
     

CHAPTER 26
     
    Holly Winter dials a number in Arizona and is almost surprised to have someone answer, a man with a rough voice who coughs loudly Representing herself as an attorney calling from a law firm in Boston, she states, without giving her name or the firm’s name, that she is trying to trace the heir to a substantial amount of money. Had I been making such a call, I’d have invented names for myself and for the fictitious law firm: “Attorney Charlotte Dickens here,” I might have said. “With Black and Lodge.” Or in rebellion against the media-free movement, I might have presented myself as Barbie Thomas of Toynbee and Trainer. But I’m not the one making the call. She is. On the one hand, she displays no imagination. On the other hand, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. In fact, she listens.
    Eventually, she says, “Maine?” She realizes that her tone makes it sound as if she has never before heard of the state of Maine or as if Maine were some exotic place on a distant continent: “Belarus?”
    Having jotted a number down on a scrap of paper, she ends the conversation and immediately dials a