I run my hands over her hair and come away with a small handful of snow that melts immediately.

　“What’s wrong?” Clare takes in the untouched food, my uncheerful demeanor. “You’re sulking because there’s no mayo?”

　“Hey. Hush.” I sit down on the broken old La-Z-Boy and Clare squeezes in beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. She puts her hand on my inner thigh. I remove it, and hold it. Her hand is cold. “Have I ever told you about my mom?”

　“No.” Clare is all ears; she’s always eager for any bits of autobiography I let drop. As the dates on the List grow few and our two years of separation loom large, Clare is secretly convinced she can find me in real time if I would only dole out a few facts. Of course, she can’t, because I won’t, and she doesn’t.

　We each eat a cookie. “Okay. Once upon a time, I had a mom. I had a dad, too, and they were very deeply in love. And they had me. And we were all pretty happy. And both of them were really terrific at their jobs, and my mother, especially, was great at what she did, and we used to travel all over, seeing the hotel rooms of the world. So it was almost Christmas—”

　“What year?”

　“The year I was six. It was the morning of Christmas Eve, and my dad was in Vienna because we were going to move there soon and he was finding us an apartment. So the idea was that Dad would fly into the airport and Mom and I would drive out and pick him up and we would all continue on to Grandma’s house for the holidays.

　“It was a gray, snowy morning and the streets were covered in sheets of ice that hadn’t been salted yet. Mom was a nervous driver. She hated expressways, hated driving to the airport, and had only agreed to do this because it made a lot of sense. We got up early, and she packed the car. I was wearing a winter coat, a knit hat, boots, jeans, a pullover sweater, underwear, wool socks that were kind of tight, and mittens. She was dressed entirely in black, which was more unusual then than it is now.”

　Clare drinks some of the milk directly from the carton. She leaves a cinnamon-colored lipstick print. “What kind of car?”

　“It was a white ‘62 Ford Fairlane.”