“I met Fuzzy Ouilette in a bar,” Don began to sing, as he and Dave’s faithful family servant got in the limo. “He’d lost his last job, his wife just left him, his dog had been killed by a car!” Don sang.

“Sounds like Coney Island!” Zasha exclaimed.

“Poor Fuzzy had no lucky star,” the Damaged Man kept singing. “No, Fuzzy had no lucky star.”

It was hard to reconcile the high hopes Mr. Barlow and I had for a snowy night in New York with everything else that was happening. “Do you think Don will be safer in Great Falls?” I asked the snowshoer, as we were trekking uptown through the snow on Seventh Avenue. Given our ski hats, and the way the snow was coming down, I thought the little English teacher hadn’t heard me.

We were almost at West Fifty-seventh Street—we were passing Carnegie Hall—when Elliot answered my question. I could tell she’d been thinking about it. “Don is a danger to himself in New York, but someone might shoot him in Montana,” the snowshoer said. That was all she said, the whole way. We were a couple of New Englanders, trekking in new snow; we weren’t out for a stroll and a conversation. Mr. Barlow had insisted that we not cross Park Avenue “too soon”; she wanted to put off finding out if it was a ski night, or it wasn’t. I think the snowshoer didn’t want to be disappointed until the last possible minute. We walked all the way to Central Park South before turning east. It was beautiful walking alongside the park in the falling snow; keeping the park on our left, we headed north on Fifth Avenue. We could have been trekking north on Park Avenue, I was thinking; we could have seen for ourselves if there were skiers on the avenue, or not. Mr. Barlow was just stalling, I knew.

We were on Park Avenue for only one block; then we turned east once more, on East Sixty-fourth. They’d not yet closed Park Avenue to traffic, whether they were going to or not. “We’re not real New Yorkers, and we never will be—we not only don’t know the rules for when there’s skiing on Park Avenue, we don’t even know who to ask,” the snowshoer said. Our not being real New Yorkers was a theme with her. She was a trans woman. What I was afraid of, for her, was that she would be an outsider anywhere—while she blamed herself for not knowing there were Russians in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.