For you, the church’s function is as a meeting place. It’s got that height and size that a landmark needs.

Churches can be grand, but this Normal Heights church is not, even though it has some height and size and a staircase that raises the whole building five feet closer to God. The church’s exterior is ordinary, too uniform to be interesting and too drab to be beautiful. There’s a workmanlike quality to the structure: what a church might look like if designed by the architect who also did the local bank.

It has a small parking lot, possibly too small for the congregation — though you would need to walk past during Sunday service and remember to look closely to say for sure. It also has a bell tower, and on Sundays and holidays, the bell rings clear and loud, though the sound stops shy of Adams Avenue. The bells can be programmed to play songs (how modern), and they do play them on occasion, five long minutes of church music clunking heavily in dry air. You don’t really know what goes on inside the church. A peek through the front door reveals a plain-ish interior, no doubt outfitted with the requisite stations of the cross and pieta and font of holy water, but you haven’t been Catholic for years.

For you, the church’s function is as a meeting place. It’s got that height and size that a landmark needs, and because it’s about equidistant from your friend’s apartment and yours, it’s easy to say, “Let’s meet at the church.” Plus, a low brick wall lines a small patch of grass on the northeast corner of the church — a perfect place to sit should you beat your friend to the rendezvous. (If, as is more likely, your friend beats you there, she doesn’t wait, just walks straight on past the church, secure in the conviction that she’ll run into you soon.)

Little free libraries are everywhere in Normal Heights;. You’ve stumbled across most of them on your walks.

Later, when your friend has died, the church is an appropriate place to stop and cry. Sometimes, the bells are ringing. There are burrs in the little patch of grass. You know this from flopping recklessly back onto it while waiting for your friend when she was alive. For this reason, when she is dead, you do not flop recklessly, though your grief would entitle you to do this.

You are walking back toward your apartment on New Year’s Eve. You were at Vons, and your friend — a different one, one who is still alive — asked you to buy ice for her party. The ice is heavy, but your brother has borrowed your car, so you have to walk. It is your friend’s — the original one, the one who is dead — birthday. You are on the phone to your friend — a third friend, one who is alive and in Denver — and she talks about her plans for the evening while you set the ice down on the low brick wall. You do not lie in the grass because of the burrs, and anyway, it is an odd thing for a person who is alone on the street to do. At some point on your walk, you passed your dead friend’s apartment, though you do not remember doing it.

You don’t always remember passing the church these days, either. Sometimes, your brain skips it like a scratched record, and you find yourself three blocks away, unsure if you’re even on the correct road, though you know you must be. You look at the flowers in the lawns to try to get your bearings, but it doesn’t really help. There are always flowers blooming in Normal Heights, on bushes and trees and lawns. It’s always one plant or another’s turn to show off. You rub the petal of a bougainvillea between your fingers.

When your friend is alive, you meet at the church, and then you walk into the neighborhood streets north of Adams. Some houses are terribly grand; you take her to a remote canyon ringed by houses that could be owned by the kids of a James Bond villain. The canyon is blanketed in orange blooms. “I’ve never been back here,” she says, even though, like you, she spent most of the pandemic walking from canyon to canyon.

Eventually, you’ll walk your dogs together. She adopts a raggedy thing, and though he is prone to barking at passing dogs and nipping at passing men, he likes you, and he likes your dog. They walk quickly together, competitive, faster than they do alone, and get home relaxed and ready to sleep through the evening.

There are other meeting places besides the church. Blind Lady Ale House. The pet store, your dogs pulling anxiously, knowing they will get treats. Your apartment, where your friend watches, bemused, while you pull your kitchen apart looking for a corkscrew. That night, you pop a bottle of Prosecco instead, and when she comes over the next week, she brings a corkscrew. You still have it, even though your other corkscrew turns up too and now you don’t know which one was hers.

She’s a reader, for completion rather than for content. Every time you pass a little free library, she stops to see what’s available — beyond the usual mysteries and self-help books. She’ll read almost any fiction, even if it’s a struggle. For three weeks in the summer, she’s reading the same novel, even though every time you meet up, she complains that it’s badly written. She finishes it, though. You take books, too, but they pile up on your bookshelf and go unread.

Little free libraries are everywhere in Normal Heights; you send her a picture of a map someone has posted in Dark Horse Coffee, showing where each can be found. You’ve stumbled across most of them on your walks, anyway. The castle. The Tardis. The libraries that are open to the air, the ones that have fancy latches. The one that has mostly kids books, and the one that has the most comprehensive collection of Danielle Steel you’ve ever seen.

She gives you one of her books once she finishes reading it, but after she has died, you don’t remember which one it is. There are too many others that you’ve taken and never given back: the Murakami and the Stephen King and the nonfiction about the collapse of civilizations. But you know it’s there, a foot from your head while you sit on the couch.

Reading, perhaps even failing to read, is solitary. When you are together, the two of you watch The Righteous Gemstones, and she squeals at the male nudity on screen. She gets one of the songs stuck in her head and texts you about it, gets it stuck in yours. You make it halfway through the second season. You don’t believe in ghosts, but when you try to watch the show after she is dead, she’s in her usual chair, silent and watching.

One night, she’s at your house and both your dogs are barking. There’s been a crash outside, and you can see a car, a motorcycle, two ambulances, and three police cars. The two of you watch, holding the dogs up to see the chaos in order to keep them quiet. “What happened?” you ask. “What will happen?” she asks. A man is loaded into an ambulance. For days afterwards, the glass from the car window sparkles in the street. You think about this after she has died, because you don’t know what happened yet, wondering if this was some kind of sick foreshadowing. It wasn’t, though. It was just one of those things.

She isn’t your best friend, but you feel warm when she comes over after Thanksgiving, laughing easily with you and your brother, wrangling her dog, drinking your wine. She has just started a new job. She’s been looking for one almost the whole time you’ve known her, and she’s busy but happy. This is so comfortable, you think. I’m so glad she is my friend.

Two weeks later, you make plans and she doesn’t show up. You walk to her apartment because you haven’t heard from her. You walk to her apartment because you know she is dead. You go get ice. You stand at the church. It is New Year’s Eve, it is her birthday, and as you set down your ice on the low church wall, the bells begin to chime.