“And you’re a doctor.”

“I’m a doctor. And the doctor says please dance with me.”

And so we danced.

With the snow, the fifteen-minute ride to Elaine and Charlie’s took over an hour, and after we got home and I was drifting off to sleep, I wished that I could ask my parents to forgive me.

Chapter 34

BY NINE O’CLOCK on New Year’s Day, I was driving Glenna to Spuyten Duyvil. Across New England a foot of new snow had fallen overnight, but the roads were clear and the sun was out, enameling the sky to a pale, lustrous blue.

“This is a nice car,” Glenna said. “I haven’t ridden in an Audi before.”

“Alex helped me pick it out. He claimed it would impress girls.”

She smiled slyly. “How’d it do?”

“Aren’t you impressed?”

“I would be if I didn’t miss your GTO.”

“Me, too.”

For nearly three hours we rode along in a euphoric bubble, as if we had slipped backward through time, a perception heightened by Glenna’s tuning in The ’60s on satellite radio. Not even the most suspicious, pessimistic observer eavesdropping from the backseat of the Audi would have guessed that my son was missing in Iraq or that Glenna and I had anything before us but a blissful, unbounded future. We talked; we laughed; we stopped at a rest area for cocoa; and Glenna suggested that we take the scenic route through Connecticut, adding twenty or thirty minutes to the trip, and giving us a chance to see the art deco bridges and the slant of the sun on fields of untouched snow.

As we crossed into Westchester, Glenna asked, “Why’d you decide to write again?”

“I’d promised myself to write a novel, and I suppose the promise had no expiration date.”

The bubble went pop when Glenna said, “You’re welcome to stay with me until Alex comes home. Do some of that writing if you want.”

“That’s a nice offer.”

She said, “And now you’ve got the end of the story.”

“Right.”

“Or I could visit you in Washington.”

“You said you could only go backward with real estate. Not people.”

“Not backward,” Glenna replied. “A new beginning.”

In my rearview mirror I spotted a New York State trooper, with his lights flashing, gaining on us. I slowed down, and he flew by in the left lane.

“Gordon?”

“Actually, I started writing the book, and I e-mailed the Brooklyn chapters to Todd.”

“Todd Elhoff? Your friend who went to Hollywood?”

“He’s a producer now, and he loved the chapters. Said he might buy the movie rights from me. And that would help sell the book to a publisher.”

“That’s promising. Is he serious?”

“Todd’s won Emmys and Golden Globes. And he’s a big part of those chapters. I’m sure he loves that.”

“Knew you could do it.”

“You did,” I said, recalling the burgundy-leather-topped writing board she’d bought me with the matching leather-bound dictionary and thesaurus. I wondered if she was thinking about those gifts and the encouragement she had given me.