Sid turned on the water, rinsed the soap off the pan, and handed it to me. “Who’s going to help me with the dishes when you leave?” He turned off the water and pulled the drain stop out of the sink. “Certainly not Maggie,” he chuckled.

I dried the pan and put it back in the drawer under the stove. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”

Sid pulled off his gloves and folded them neatly over the chrome faucet. Then he glanced at me and said, “Come on. Don’t make me kick you out now.”

I stacked the plates that I’d already dried in the pine hutch to my right and turned my head slightly to catch Sid’s expression. The rise of his mustache told me he was smiling a little; the way his lower lip quivered told me he was trying not to.

“And Joe,” he said, “sooner is better than later.”

It was midnight when Cal and I got back to my cabin, and we didn’t see any reason to sleep, given that we had to be in the car by 4:30 to get Cal to the airport on time. I made a pot of coffee, and we went for the guitars. Naturally, I picked the Martin and Cal grabbed the Silvertone. He told me he’d been struggling for months with a song and wanted me to help him figure it out. Though when we got down to it, it came to light that it wasn’t yet a song. It was a vibe. A feeling. A sonic conversation Cal said he could hear in his head like a foreign language he didn’t understand.

“I need a translator,” he told me.

I asked him to give me a few adjectives to describe the sound he was looking for, and I laughed as he paced around the room in that swanky Western shirt, black sparkle guitar hanging like a rifle over his shoulder, Cowgirl Coffee mug in hand.

He turned to me and rubbed his left thumb and index finger together as if he were crushing the essence of what he was trying to convey. “Romantic homesickness? Nostalgia?” He narrowed his eyes, looked sideways at me. “But not so broad. Not so vague.”

“Saudade,” I mumbled.

“Sa-u-what?”

“A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.”

His eyes widened as if he’d just watched me do a magic trick. “Yes. That. But. Imagine it . . . evolving . . . a big, swelling bridge. . . . It’s the longing, and then the afterparty of that longing . . . like, if we start out with this feeling of loss, of that word you just said—”

“Saudade,” I repeated, and was instantly back at October’s kitchen table, so sure of myself as I read her the list of words on my phone, her warm breath causing the hair on my neck to stand up. “It’s Portuguese.”