I mean, just when you’re finally, belatedly starting to figure out who you are and what you want your life to be, to maybe actually even grow up at long, long last, what in the world would possess a person to buy her family house? How could you figure out who you were without your family if said family was always under foot?

Just as I reached the road, John’s car pulled up beside me.

He rolled down the window. “Come on, get in.”

I kept walking toward the soft glow of a streetlight.

He crawled along beside me.

“It’s not that far,” I said. “I want to walk. Go.”

We could barely see each other.

John handed me the flashlight.

I didn’t even say thank-you.

Chapter Eighteen

Ethan and I sat across from each other in the teachers’ room, each with a notebook in front of us, ready to brainstorm. Mine was a college-lined composition book, Ethan’s an unlined spiral sketchbook.

A beam of late afternoon sun coming in through the room’s only window landed right on Ethan’s surfer-boy hair. Not so much like a halo, but more like he should be in an ad for Sun In. Did they still make Sun In?

“Obviously, this co-chair deal is all new to me,” Ethan said, “so what if you go first?”

“How about this,” I said. “We have the kids in one class all in reindeer antlers. And we let them dance and sing to a medley of ‘Up on the Housetop,’ and ‘He’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,’ except we change that to the tried and true preschool version, ‘He’ll Be Coming Down the Chimney.’ I’ll tweak the lyrics, make them a little bit more fun. We’ll recruit Gloria and her pitch pipe to keep everybody relatively on key.”

Ethan nodded. “I can build a plywood chimney, three-sided with an open back. We can ask Polly to paint it to look like red bricks, and then we can glue cotton balls around the top to make fake snow. We can set up a little stepladder behind it that the audience won’t be able to see. That way the kids can look out over the top and it will look like they’re inside the chimney.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “The kids can take turns climbing up a couple of steps, doing something cute to give their parents a video moment, and then climbing back down. We’ll put lots of foam on the floor around the ladder. And we’ll have the assistant with the quickest reflexes hiding back there with the kids so we don’t take any chances.”

Ethan turned to a fresh page, sketched away.

He swiveled the notebook around and showed me his perfect preschool chimney.

“Unbelievable,” I said. “You’re just so talented.”