That November in Munich, I was almost seventy-one; Em was already seventy-seven. Maybe we went on watching those German students because the inexorable march of time had caught up to Otto; maybe Otto’s mortality made Em and me imagine our own. That November in Munich, when we heard Otto had died in L.A., Toby Goode was thirty-five. Matthew was twenty-one.

There was no time difference in Toronto, where Em and I watched the 2016 U.S. election results on TV. In immigration terms, I’d become a permanent resident of Canada in 2015. I would be eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship in 2018. Em was already a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and I would become one in December 2019. Em and I had voted in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, via absentee ballot, for Hillary Clinton. Matthew was with us in Toronto for that election night; he’d voted for Clinton in New York.

A former girlfriend of Matthew’s watched the election results with us. Matthew had met Carol on the subway when she was a Bishop Strachan student; Em and I agreed that Carol looked cute in her BSS uniform, in that short skirt with her knees showing. “Nice knees—I saw her knees first,” I remembered Em saying to me. I used to wonder, when Matthew and Carol were no longer dating each other, if Matthew missed seeing her in the BSS uniform. “You miss seeing Carol in the BSS uniform, kiddo—I know I do,” Em told me.

Carol was Matthew’s age, twenty-five, when we watched Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump; we’d not seen Carol in a BSS uniform for six or seven years. I was almost seventy-five and Em eighty-one. On that election night, I might have wished that Em was still not speaking, but Em was making up for lost time.

“Trump is a pussy-grabber,” Carol repeated, for the fourth or fifth time. In her BSS uniform, or not, Carol was angry about a self-described pussy-grabber going to the White House.

Em was angry at our fellow Democrats and about Trump’s pussy-grabbing. In 2012, Obama got more votes than Hillary. Who were those Democrats who didn’t show up for Mrs. Clinton? “All of them weren’t crybabies for Bernie,” Em was saying. I was a registered voter in Vermont; I’d always voted for Bernie. We’d all wanted Bernie, but Bernie hadn’t been nominated. The Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Hillary were like the ones who didn’t vote for Humphrey in 1968, Em was saying. “Those Democrats gave us Nixon, these Democrats gave us Trump!” Em was raving.

At two in the morning, in the Trump headquarters in New York, there were yahoos in coats and ties and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN baseball caps. They were chanting for Hillary to be locked up. Em essentially said Trump didn’t win the election. “Our fucking fellow Democrats lost it—we gave it to him!” Em was screaming.