As my mother began dying that winter, we even made a friend there: a big white-haired old man who always wore an L.L.Bean field coat and wide-wale corduroys, and who would often appear in the snack area at the same time we did. He cut such an unusual figure and had such an otherworldly presence when we’d talk that I started to wonder if Virgilius—that was actually his name—was real or if he was instead some sort of apparition, a phantom, a ghost, sent to teach me something I didn’t know I needed to learn. Natural or supernatural, by early spring as my mother continued her decline, we stopped seeing Virgilius at the snack bar. The emptiness I felt at the unexplained absence of a virtual stranger made me almost wish we’d never met him. There was only so much loss I could brace for.

Teddy would finish his churro or his slice, or both, and then we’d do a fake-shop: I’d use my expired membership card to enter the warehouse area and walk around without buying anything. We were trying to save money, and not renewing our old membership seemed like a smart thing, as did walking up and down the aisles and looking at all the shiny stuff we knew we weren’t going to buy: flat-screen TVs and video game systems, keyboards and guitars, toaster ovens and vacuum cleaners, giant slabs of meat and huge boxes of cereal. Not even a weirdly packaged DVD of the first season of There’s a Bird on Your Head that Teddy once found and held up to his face until I took his picture with my old BlackBerry, back when he would still let me do things like that. After a complete circuit through the store we’d leave, slipping out through an empty register aisle, past the snack area where we’d started, toward the automatic sliding doors into the cold and out to the car, looking one last time for Virgilius.

Sometimes Teddy would ask me if I thought we didn’t see him anymore because he was sick and dying, too, and unlike some of the other questions he’d ask me then—What kind of cancer does Bubbie have? Why does she sleep all the time now? How come she isn’t fat anymore? Is she going to die?—I didn’t have an answer for him. All I knew was that his absence was proof that people stayed with you for the rest of your life no matter when you stopped seeing them or when their body disappeared from your world.

Just as we’d go through the sliding doors and my face would hit the rush of cold air, just when I’d feel myself slipping away into the familiar comfort of that dissociative state, away from remembering that my mother was dying, Teddy would take my hand on the way to the car, and bring me back. We were buddies on a field trip, going somewhere on the other side of the glass together.