On New Year’s Eve, as I Windexed and wiped display cases, Afi limped out of the back room. He was pale, with frosty white whiskers growing high on his gaunt cheeks.

“Good God, Kat, what do you have on?”

I stood and looked down. Afi never got my outfits. It was a running joke between us. This one, I supposed, was especially hard to comprehend.

“It’s the grunge look.” I posed for him, tapping the toe of my Doc Martens out to the side and displaying the full length of slash marks down the front of my baggy jeans. My chunky knit sweater with old leather buttons and its thumb holes at the base of the too-long sleeves hung mid-thigh.

“The what?”

“Grunge look.”

“You look like that on purpose?”

“Yep.”

Afi shook his head, but I suspected that it was more than fashion trends on his mind.

“Are you feeling OK, Afi? Why don’t you go home?”

He looked around, as if unsure of his bearings. “You think I should?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

He brought a blue-veined hand to his temple and rubbed. “I miss it, you know.”

Uh-oh. He’d only been at the store for an hour, tops. Hardly enough time to work up a hankering for his couch. He’d been sick since the storm, and all he did the whole time was bellyache about being housebound. He wasn’t making sense.

“Are you OK to walk?” I asked him.

“God, no,” he said. “I’ll have to fly.”

I waited for him to explain. He said nothing. I tucked my chin in. I was the bird in the family, but you didn’t hear me preparing for takeoff. Maybe Afi wasn’t over the flu? Maybe he was sicker than we thought?

“Should I drive you?” I asked.

“Drive me? To Iceland? Don’t be silly.”

“Who said anything about Iceland?” I said.

“It’s my home,” he said, pulling his anorak from a hook by the door. “And you’re right I should go.”

Afi clomped to the door and was trudging down the snow-banked sidewalk before I could respond. I had no idea where he was headed.

I called my mom and gave her a heads-up on his strange behavior. She promised to check on him before going out for the evening.

As I scrambled to close up early, with New Year’s plans for a party at Tina’s boyfriend Matthew’s house, my head started to itch.

Shoot. A scalp rash was the archaic means by which we Storks communicated a nine p.m., same-day meeting. As always, I exhaled a huff of steam at our prehistoric ways. Even courier pigeon would be more technologically advanced and would at least keep with our bird theme.

I punched Jack’s number into my cell phone. We hadn’t seen each other since the day after Christmas, when he dropped me at Afi’s house. In the space of five days, he and Stanley had become the new couple — as two-ply as Charmin Ultra — poring over Stanley’s research notes, running around the county collecting data, and preparing for the researcher’s arrival. And I was still running my own personal shopgirl marathon.

“Hey. It’s me,” I said.

“What’s up, buttercup?” It was a corny line, and he overused it, but it made my insides melt. It did. I heard the slosh.

“A little wrench in the evening.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Stork duty.”

“But you’ll be done by what? Nine-o-two?”

It was true that our Stork meetings — though always long, drawn-out affairs whose rules and regulations probably predated the Roman Republic — accounted for mere minutes of real time, but it was a little rattling that the guy knew me well enough to punch a hole in my busy-delivering-souls alibi.

“Except that Hulda always keeps me after.” Now I sounded like a whining schoolgirl. “I think I should meet you at Matthew’s.”

“OK. See you there, then.”

I hung up, sensing my stomach gurgle. There was an awkwardness between Jack and me. We talked daily by phone and both had legitimate distractions; still, there was a muck-filled puddle in the road we were both politely stepping around.

The only good news of the day was that the normally wicked boiling and bubbling and prickling of my scalp wasn’t nearly as bad as in the past. About time.

Though I had another itch, and that was to shake things up a bit.