William’s eyes ached from staring at the computer screen for more than an hour with only four-and-a-half sentences to show for it, along with numerous deletions and cursing. Plus, he was seventy-eight years old and his optic nerves tended to pack it in long before the evening news came on TV.

His oak desk sat facing the front window of the second-floor Christopher Street apartment that he had shared with his wife Jill since Ronald Reagan was president. It was mid-July and the pane was open several inches, letting the warm evening breeze ruffle his papers and the excited chatter of passerby distract him.

“Time to wind it down, I guess,” William said to the empty room. He didn’t bother saving his document, but instead, got to his feet and stretched, feeling the ache of his perpetual sciatica, and realized with dismay that his plan to write a new collection of short stories wasn’t exactly on the tracks quite yet.

Jill died nearly a year ago. William returned from a Sunday morning walk and found her collapsed on the cerulean Mexican rug that lay in front of the sofa. He never could have guessed that when she reminded him to pick up more coffee filters as he went out the door, that would be the last time he’d ever hear her voice.

The rug was one of the first things William had donated; a local charity shop was more than happy to take it. He cleaned out her side of the closet and her drawers in their dresser, and sorted through all her papers, organizing them as best he could. The only visible hints of Jill around the apartment were the tchotchkes that the two of them had acquired during their dozens of trips across the United States and beyond its borders. In addition to helping her husband manage their bookshop in SoHo, Jill had been a freelance travel writer and tended to be the guiding force in choosing adventure over stagnation in their marriage.

She also preferred to keep a tidy apartment – and a tidy husband. William tried his best to carry on her legacy, but he was prone to not combing his hair and ignoring lint on his tweed jackets. Although he vacuumed once a week and changed the bathroom towels as often as he remembered to, William had resolutely kept the unruly bookshelves that lined the main room and the bedroom as they had for forty-one years. He was particularly proud of his short story collection, which featured rumpled paperbacks by writers like Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor, some first editions. William needed to be in the constant presence of role models to maintain a decent level of internal confidence – which made the writing gig even tougher.

The bookstore had taken up the bulk of his life, but fiction writing had always lingered right behind it, waiting to be tried and used, like a new pair of sneakers.

Before figuring out what to make – or order –for dinner, William decided to stretch his legs and take the recycling down to the dumpster in the alley.

He left his apartment and made his way carefully down the carpeted stairs, carrying a plastic bin of week-old New York Times and empty takeout cartons. He was about to head to the rear entrance when he spotted a package on the front table, where deliveries were typically left.

It was a padded envelope about the size of a compact disc, with a Los Angeles postmark but no return address. The addressee was J. Parker and the address wasn’t the building William lived in. It was the same street, but a different number.

William knew from experience that his neighbors had no interest in helping homeless envelopes and packages to reunite with their rightful owners. This was a character trait inherent in native New Yorkers and cynical transplants alike. Being born and raised in kindly Columbus, Ohio, though, William automatically wanted to help, no matter how difficult the situation. This came in especially handy when assisting indecisive bookstore customers with finding the perfect read for their moods. The shop was now managed by his adult son and daughter, who had thankfully inherited more than a bit of his generosity.

William set down his recycling bin under the rows of metal mailboxes, pushed open the heavy front door and stepped outside. It was still early on Sunday night and men walked past on the sidewalk in cheerful groups, off to cocktails to prepare for the coming work week. Taxis rumbled past and teenagers in tank tops hollered from open windows, telling their girlfriends to put down their phones and pay attention to them, for once.

William took another look at the building number on the package, turned left, then walked for a bit, paying attention to the numbers on each of the buildings.

There’s a 138 and a 144, but no 142 – just a path leading to the back alley. Right zip code, though. What in the heck?

William glanced at the package again. No, he hadn’t misread it. But: J. Parker, he thought. Why does that name sound familiar?

He turned and walked back toward his own building. A delivery driver stepped under an awning in front of him, checking information on her phone.

“Hi, excuse me!” William said. “Sorry to bother you.”

The woman looked up and flashed him a look of half-pity that William had seen more often, with each birthday that passed. Not all senior citizens are pitiable weaklings, he thought.

William showed her the package. “This was left at my building, but I’m 136,” he said. “It was delivered to the wrong spot.”

The woman scratched her nose. Her eyes darted back and forth, like she was already imagining getting in her van and driving to her next destination, maybe tossing the package in the back and choosing not to worry about it until tomorrow. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry about that, sir.”

William always hated it when customers at his bookstore disagreed with the way he displayed books or why he recommended certain titles, but he’d always just tried to smile and nod. So, part of him knew how the driver was feeling, but he truly had a legitimate point.

“Have an amazing night,” the woman said, without seeming to mean it. She accepted the package from him and hustled away.

* * *

William went for a walk the next morning with his old friend, Larry. They ambled to Washington Square Park and watched the chess players and the acoustic musicians who pleaded for donations after singing melancholy songs about wounded falcons and ill-fated ships. Larry was a retired art dealer and always told William the latest innocuous gossip from that scene, including record prices of paintings sold at auction and the twists in the romantic lives of hotshot painters. It was certainly preferable to discussing vitamin supplements and insomnia, but Larry had been such a supportive pal after Jill had passed away that William was just grateful for the company. Plus, Larry worked out four times a week at his condo’s private gym and was an intimidating physical presence against potential muggers. William couldn’t believe that a man who collected social security could have such enormous biceps.

He also couldn’t stop thinking about the mysterious package – and wondering why J. Parker sounded so familiar.

Larry walked him to his building and gave him a hug before heading off to a lecture at Parsons; he kept a busy social calendar. William had reached the point where he often thought about the loving touch of a woman again, especially on the many nights when he had trouble getting to sleep. But hugs from close allies went a long way toward filling that need for physical connection.

“See you soon,” he told Larry.

William went inside his building. A brilliant cerulean Mexican rug, wrapped in plastic, was propped against the wall near the mailboxes. At first glance, it looked exactly like the one that had lain in front of his sofa for more than twenty years – the rug that Jill had picked out in a bustling street market in Oaxaca.

William bent down to check the mailing label. But he knew what he’d find even before he adjusted his powerful, chunky black glasses to take a closer look.

J. Parker.

His stomach twisted and he grabbed the edge of the mailboxes for support. The pain was more than his normal ache of indigestion when he forgot to eat prunes in the morning. This was more significant, and it fit the strange goings on.

William went outside and looked up the street, then down. No delivery vans, just the normal hustle and bustle of a late Sunday morning in the Village.

He went up to his apartment and looked again at the empty spot on the hardwood floor. That morning it felt like it needed to be covered, replaced with a brightness that lightened the apartment and brought with it a new phase of things.

His cell phone rang. It was his daughter, Amelia.

“Dad, Seb Callahan is here at the shop. He’s asking when you’re publishing your next book. He says he’s not leaving until he gets an answer.”

William sighed. “Tell him I’m a long time from finishing a manuscript, but I’m not giving up.”

After he hung up with Amelia, William took a hardback copy of his short story collection, published ten years before, from the shelf. He sat down at the kitchen table and remembered how exciting it had been to find first an agent, then a publisher when he was sixty-five years old. The book was reviewed in the Times and several prominent literary blogs – and it reached the point soon after where Jill had to take on the bulk of the responsibilities at the shop while William tried to keep writing, while giving talks at local universities.

But crucially: he never finished enough stories to assemble into a new collection. Literary magazines didn’t seem too excited about his work then, either. Writing faded away and he concentrated on the store, training his kids on the ins and outs of the business and taking day trips with Jill.

Coming out of the bleary fog after her death and taking a fresh look around had prompted William to try again.

William paged through the book. He remembered how he often used past adventures with Jill as inspirations for the stories – like when they encountered an escaped prisoner on the run at a rest stop outside of Memphis, or when they had to be rescued by helicopter from their flooding hotel in Cincinnati.

Maybe the reason why I can’t think of new stories is that my memories of my times with her are trickling away, like water down a drain. It’s getting harder and harder to remember, and easier to forget.

Just then, as he was skimming the book, William read the name Julie Parker in one of the stories. Julie the character was a variation on his wife Jill, and the story was about how an elderly couple who managed a bookshop were held captive by two mentally deranged criminals. The dangerous men were convinced they had an unpublished manuscript by Truman Capote on their shelves, whom one of them had loved, years ago.

Which really happened, of course.

(No, of course it didn’t.)

That package from yesterday – and that rug – were they sent to me from Jill, somehow – from beyond the grave? But why wasn’t the building number right?

William tried to go about his day. He sat at his desk for more than three hours and listened to his favorite Jackson Browne CD on repeat, but he only got less than a page done. Part of him wondered if he needed to start outlining his work so he had more of an idea of where he was going, but then he thought that might remove the spontaneity that so many reviewers and readers had enjoyed about his first collection.

“I’m too old to be worrying about this,” he said. But what else should I be doing, but trying to tell stories?

He decided to go out for an early dinner, to the Greek coffee shop on the corner that he and Jill had frequented hundreds of times. It had been only recently that William had ventured there again; he was finally able to think of it as place where he could grow nourished from his memories, not grow sad from his loss.

Yet, it hadn’t helped him write new work.

William went downstairs. The rug was still propped against the wall. He walked straight past it and went to the restaurant, where he treated himself to a dinner of a patty melt, fries and a decaf coffee. He sat in the same booth that he and Jill had always taken and tried to imagine her delicate pale face, her gentle white-blonde curls, her indulgent smile when he told her of his plans for them after their kids took over the shop and they suddenly had an enormous amount of time to themselves. Plans that were changed in an instant.

William opened his eyes. He was the only person in the booth.

A voice inside told him that it was too early to go back to his empty apartment and face that mediocre first page of his new story. He should instead walk around the neighborhood a bit, try to observe, remember and use what he saw for his fiction to come.

But: he couldn’t stop thinking about the rug.

William went back to his building and entered the lobby. Ben, a neighbor down the hall from him, was just opening his mailbox. He played in a lacrosse league and worked as a club bouncer at night. He had a crew cut that reminded William of the time he’d served in the Army.

“Hi,” William said.

Ben turned to him with a smile. “Hi, yourself,” he said. “What’s the latest? And no, I haven’t read that book you recommended. Sorry. Gen Z’s like me tend to be pretty lame when it comes to reading.”

William spoke before he could second-guess himself. “I was wondering if you could carry that new rug up to my place for me,” he said. His voice had a nervous tremble. “The delivery driver didn’t realize that I’m an old geezer and can’t haul it up there myself.”

Ben turned to the rug. “Sure,” he said. He bent down and hoisted the rug onto one strong shoulder; William was grateful that he hadn’t looked at the address label. “Lead the way,” Ben said.

William had convinced himself that it wasn’t stealing because the addressee didn’t even exist. He led Ben up the carpeted stairs to his apartment and unlocked the door. “Come on in,” he said.

Ben set the rug down and William helped him unwrap it, then spread it out in front of the sofa. “Gosh,” Ben said. “I’m not really a home décor type of guy, but this is real handsome. It suits the place.”

“I’m glad you think so,” William answered. “It’s pretty similar to the one we used to have,” he added, in the understatement of the year.

William looked down at the brilliant cerulean wool and remembered Jill’s determination as she bargained with the seller in that Mexican street market. His breath caught in his throat.

“Hey,” Ben said. He wrapped William in a tight hug and gave him a few extra pats on the back, for emphasis. William knew then that Ben had a surprisingly accurate read on the situation, even though they were only friendly neighbors and not much beyond that.

“Text me anytime if you need anything,” Ben said. “You know how to text, right?

“Get out of here,” William said with a grin. “I’m not that old of a geezer. And thanks.”

Ben left the apartment and William was left with the mysterious rug. Things felt different in the room, like everything was holding its breath.

“Well,” William said, his gaze focused on the blue fabric. “If you sent me this, somehow, some way… I don’t know how you did it. But I’m scared that I’m forgetting stuff. Things we did together, people we met. It was so much fun to use those stories to create my own. I want to do that again.”

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then stepped onto the rug.

“Billy,” a familiar voice said gently.

William opened his eyes. He was back in the Greek coffee shop, staring into the kind blue eyes of his wife. She sat across the booth from him, nursing a cup of coffee.

“Hi,” he said. “How did—”

“Shh,” Jill said. “If you’re ever stuck, if you ever want to remember a story, a trip… Just step on that rug and think of me. I’ll be here and I’ll remind you. We can remember it together. We can only visit for a little while, but I bet it’ll be enough.”

Wet snow kissed the window next to them and New Yorkers hustled past in the darkness, their coat collars turned up against the blustery wind. He and Jill had always loved to come to the cozy restaurant when the heater in their apartment was on the fritz.

“I can’t write the dang story for you,” Jill added. “But I’ll give you what you need to remember. And maybe a nudge to get you out on your own again, too. Maybe there’s another woman who will tolerate your Saturday lunches. Liverwurst sandwiches with raw onion. Yuck.”

William wondered if he was about to start crying, but then he realized that there was no reason to. Everything was going to be okay.