I thrust the wretched foster care papers across the counter. They fall on the floor and I don’t bother to pick them up.

“For all I know I could be related to you, or to Sophie, or to one of the boys Wolfe saw fishing in the river Etchemin. I could descend from a Gaspé fisherman whose nets Wolfe shredded in 1758. I could be a complete nobody. I’ve never found out. Madame Blanchard was no help. She cared only about beauty….”

“Beauty?”

“Well, I never saw anyone else’s mother trek down to the beach and take her shoes off on laundry day—a fine Monday of warm wind and sun—and walk the sea-frill where the hard stripe of wet sand shines, and pick up a pocketful of quartz and green glass and bits of bone-white pottery she called willow-ware decorated with pictures of the very ocean waves that had smoothed and broken its pieces. She laid these on the white windowsill and she filled the milk jug with flowers other mothers yanked from their cabbage gardens with rusty trowels. She did not play cards at night, nor take the bingo bus, nor watch Days of Our Lives on the television in the afternoons, and she despised it when I signed up.”

“Do you feel you let her down?”

“I don’t know how she felt—all I cared about was the boy, Elwyn, who the lieutenant brought to our class. The lieutenant pointed out Elwyn’s insignia: a chevron—and boasted that Elwyn had completed a course in weapons management and threat response in Longueuil and was about to leave for service in Afghanistan. In June. The very time we would all be enjoying the fruits of peace and good government in our lovely meadows.”

“Elwyn wore a chevron?”

“I liked the chevron’s grace but I’d never been seduced by flags or fancy uniforms before, and I did not think I’d be any good at polishing my shoes. Elwyn had a glittering starburst that kept flashing on his boot-toe as the sun glanced off our classroom’s window frames.”

“Elwyn’s boots dazzled you!”

“It was none of those things that drew me. It wasn’t the dazzle. It wasn’t the boots.”

Harold knits thoughtfully. “So what was it?”

…It was the fourteenth of May, and robins had come back to our cove, and we were all watching for the moment when we could pick fiddleheads and devour them twice-boiled to get rid of the bitterness. At our house Madame Blanchard melted pats of real butter on the greens instead of margarine. I had seen two dragonflies and harvested most of our rhubarb. Now here was a boy, Elwyn, all dragonfly, all robin, all burgeoning newness of strong, sour, wild rhubarb, having a face whose beauty pierced through me clear and sharp as an arrow of geese flung home from the blue….

“Where have you gone?” asks Harold.

Where have I gone?