It’s a distinctly unromantic notion, that our life is made of all these collisions, and that they have no meaning other than just being, but life is mostly not made of romantic stuff. It’s grit and school lunches and paying bills. In movies couples bathe together surrounded by a dangerous number of candles. In real life, a shared bath with an adult is like being jammed into a bucket of elbows.

If I’m to be honest, alone in this van driving to Anchorage with the wind behind me, squalls flipping whitecaps on the Turnagain like the fins of a thousand belugas, I only realised how attached I’d become to the idea of the baby once it was lost.

It was Lacy who floated the possibility of having a baby, who put the picture of that life in my mind. I know she wanted it, but I think she also saw it as a sign of permanency. Which is ironic, since Travis left when life with a baby proved too much for him, not that Cedar can ever hear a thought like that.

The miscarriage was incomplete, and waiting didn’t change that, Misoprostol didn’t change it. In the D and C, Lacy’s uterus was damaged. Odds four in a thousand. We are still waiting to see how things go. Lacy is not allowed to get pregnant for now. She may not be able to again.

My phone is in its dock and I unpause my nineties Australian indie playlist. A different time. Ratcat’s ‘Don’t Go Now’, jangly punk with the choruses buffed to a sheen, uni, the inexplicable world of girls.

As soon as I’m off the highway, I take a left and loop back under it. The first set of traffic lights on East Tudor Road turns red as I get close. To the right is the strip mall that includes Aladdin’s, the Mediterranean restaurant that’s home base for the Anchorage South Rotary Club at lunchtime on Thursdays. Wade is opening the door for me at the club, and I’m likely to take it. If real estate is in my sights in a serious way, it’d be a wise move. Wade is one of the tribal elders, a PDG – Past District Governor. Rotary in Alaska is younger than I thought it’d be. Or maybe I’m older than I once was. My father was a Rotarian, long ago.

Wade took me to a meeting as his guest a couple of weeks ago. He is determined to wipe polio – or, as he always puts it, ‘the scourge of polio’ – from the face of the earth. This is a Rotary goal that he has taken on as personal. He is a Republican – of course he is – but, when separated from his obsessive small-government rhetoric, he is often a force for good and we align on far more than I had expected. His American Empire is an uncomplicated one – an empire spreading vaccines, a certain set of freedoms and a go-get-’em private-sector ideology that will magically elevate the poor to entrepreneurship – and he laments its decline because he believes the world will be the less for the absence of these good influences.