In the corner of the fitting room, Kate looked up from her magazine and asked, “What’s the matter?”

“I felt something,” said Joan.

Kate closed the magazine and stretched. “Can we go pretty soon, Mom? I’m hungry.”

“Me, too!” Lita cried, poking her head through the curtains into the fitting room. “I’m starving.”

“Okay, okay,” said Joan. She pulled the dress off slowly. It tingled faintly when she draped it over her arm.

The following week, on a hot afternoon in June, Joan wore the dress to a Friends of the Library meeting and, while the tingle and ache she’d felt in the fitting room did not return, she found herself plagued by a terrible restlessness. Barely able to sit through the meeting, she sought relief afterward by wandering through Reference and Periodicals, looking up facts on Bangladesh.

“Did you know,” she asked her daughters when she got home, “that eighty-six percent of the people in Bangladesh live below the poverty level?”

The girls were on the couch, reading. Lita did not emerge from her Nancy Drew book, but Kate looked up. “That’s terrible,” she said.

Joan added, “They can’t even afford a nutritionally adequate diet. Eighty-six percent!”

“Those poor people,” Kate said, and she waited a decent interval before returning to her book.

Joan skipped the next meeting of the Friends of the Library entirely. This time she found references in the New York Times Index to a cyclone that had devastated Bangladesh the previous spring — half a million people dead or missing, the Times reported; a twenty-five-foot tidal wave had pushed fifteen miles inland and then rolled back out to sea, taking people and houses and animals with it. Sitting at the microfilm machine, Joan thought about the woman who made the double rows of perfect buttonholes on the dress from Bangladesh. Did her sewing machine lie rusting now on the floor of the Bay of Bengal?

“There were pictures in the paper,” she told Charlie and the girls in the backyard when she got home. “In Bangladesh, when a cyclone comes, people tie their children to trees so they won’t blow away. But this one was so bad it pulled up the trees, children and all.” In the library Joan had heard the terrible ripping sound, the wailing of babies lost in the roar of the wind.