“I’ve got to call the airlines.”

“I wish you were coming here. We could all be together.”

Her voice was getting funny. My mother was about to cry.

“I wish I could, too,” I said.

Late Sunday morning I drove to the airport along dark, wet roads running through a dazzling world of glass. Ice loosened by the sun slipped from telephone lines, roofs, and trees, shattering to the ground like crystal missiles dropped from the sky. The weather report called for another storm, and I was deeply pleased, despite the inconvenience. I wanted quiet time in front of, the fire with my niece. Lucy was growing up.

It did not seem so long ago that she was born. I would never forget her wide, unblinking eyes following my every move in her mother’s house, or her bewildering fits of petulance and grief when I failed her in some small way. Lucy’s open adoration touched my heart as profoundly as it frightened me. She had caused me to experience a depth of feeling I had not known before. Talking my way past Security, I waited at the gate, eagerly searching passengers emerging from the boarding bridge. I was looking for a pudgy teenager with long, irk red hair and braces when a striking young woman met my eyes and grinned.

“Lucy, ” I exclaimed, hugging her. “My God. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Her hair was short and deliberately messy, accentuating dear green eyes and good bones I did not know she had. There was not so much as a hint of metal in her mouth, and her thick glasses had been replaced by weightless tortoise-shell frames that gave her the look of a seriously pretty Harvard scholar. But it was the change in her body that astonished me most, for since I had seen - her last she had been transformed from a chunky adolescent into a lean, leggy athlete dressed in snug, faded jeans several inches too short, a white blouse, a woven red leather belt, loafers, and no socks. She carried a book satchel, and I caught the sparkle of a delicate gold ankle bracelet. I was fairly certain she was wearing neither makeup nor bra.

“Where’s your coat?” I asked as we headed to Baggage.

“It was eighty degrees when I left Miami this morning,” “You’ll freeze walking out to the car.”

“It’s physically impossible for me to freeze while walking to your car unless you’re parked in Chicago.”

“Perhaps you have a sweater in your suitcase?”

“You ever notice that you talk to me the same way Grans talks to you? By the way, she thinks I look like a ‘pet rocker.’ That’s her malapropism for the month. It’s what you get when you cross a pet rock with a punk rocker.”

“I’ve got a couple of ski jackets, corduroys, hats, gloves. You can borrow anything you wish.”

She slipped her arm in mine and staffed my hair. “You’re still not smoking.”

“I’m still not smoking and I hate being reminded that I’m still not smoking because then I think about smoking.”