I was always one of those women that hung out too long at the counter with the other women in vintage clothing shops like the one in Baltimore where we gathered around Lucinda Williams as if she were a patron saint. And then Sam happened. Sam, who fit into that world and made larger it and brought his own globe over and we made a life of it all. A messy, tangle of life with plastic beads in his thirties, my late-fifties greens. His restrained deco decor and silk ties in colors that claimed the spice rack. Everything richer after Sam and that sense, that Peter Pan girl-feeling I had of being ever-single and moving in some circle of people that were, too, it evaporated so organically, so gently with Sam that I find myself stunned that there was a time I lived with...cufflinks and his big floppy clown-foot gym shoes and that there was a time after that, when I boxed his things reverently, breathed in his scent as if my lungs could keep him that way, and put our life away in storage. I didn't explicitly tell myself that he would be back and we would go to the desolate always-same rows of storage units and we would turn the key and our objects and his things wedded together behind some door with numbers on it would be waiting and we might then, right here, pull up a chair and resume. But I didn't and I know this, really tell myself that it would be impossible to store him and therefore us, for a better, later time. I lived with cufflinks, I thought, the way someone else might mutter the winning numbers of the lottery ticket that took them from destitute to beachfront property. Once upon a time, there were cufflinks on my dressing table.