“No, I saw her in the garden.” Marie-Claude feels a face, a squat forehead, the sharp edge of an aquiline nose, an ugly, distended mouth, taking shape within her. “She was young, perhaps the same age as I was then, but her face was old with sadness. She held herself straight, upright, but inside she was bent with grief.”

“How did you know she was a ghost?”

“When you see a ghost, you know it. You feel it.”

“Was she see-through? Did you speak to her?”

“She was different. Something about her movements. And she was so sad, the way she walked around the garden, touching petals and branches, as if she could rid some of her sadness on them. It might have been the way her mouth was shaped. I don’t know. It’s difficult to describe how I knew.”

Flo pushes off hard from her mother’s headrest and falls back in her seat. She pops a sourball out of its cellophane wrapper and, after putting it into her mouth, sighs loudly.

A sweet fake-lime smell works its way quickly to the front.

“Have I lost you?” Marie-Claude says, finding Flo’s bulging cheek in the rearview mirror.

“Nothing happens in this story.”

Marie-Claude has an awful impulse (because they are so rude, demanding the story she didn’t want to tell, then snubbing it, Flo so impatient, Tristan already asleep) to remind them of sadness. It would be so easy to do. She waits for the resentment to subside, then continues: “She wasn’t transparent, but her skin was peculiar. I’m sure that’s how I knew she wasn’t human.”

“What do you mean, peculiar?”

“It was like patina almost, that greenish color that gets on certain metals, you know, the way that bracelet of your father’s, the one he wears for his imaginary arthritis, the way that turns when he forgets to make someone polish it. That’s how her skin looked up close.” Instead of the woman Marie-Claude sees the wrist, its hairless skin beneath the bracelet, the puffed vein that travels from his hand to his elbow. She still loves him. If he does not come back she will never feel again what she felt touching that arm.

“I like polishing it. He doesn’t make me.”

“Oh, Flo, you don’t remember. You used to hate it. The polish stung your eyes. Anyway, her skin was like that.” Beside her, Tristan’s head, which has been slipping and jerking back, slipping and jerking back, finally slides all the way over to the armrest on his door. She checks the lock and feels for a moment what he feels: that delicious surrender to sleep in the passenger seat of a car.