“It won’t be an aw-shucks, seeming nice guy—not the next time, you assholes!” Em was screaming at Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—or at everyone in the Tea Party, or at all the Republicans. Em had a point. There was an angry bullying about the patriotism down south—as we say in Canada, when we mean the United States. Matthew and I knew what Em meant—the next bad Republican president, whoever it was, wouldn’t have Reagan’s B-actor charm.

Matthew and I just went on watching the same dumb game. We kept replaying Susan Bigioni’s ten seconds about Bathurst Station; I don’t know why it held our attention. Maybe that was when I saw where I belonged—where the voice on the subway told me all the stops. It’s such a clear voice.

As Em and Matthew know, I hear the silence in the Rock Garden no less clearly.

I can tell when Em is thinking about Nora or the snowshoer—the way she lowers her eyes when she is cast down. I never know what to say. “There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.

Em does a better job with me when she knows I’m in the Rock Garden. “There are German students somewhere, kiddo—they’re still singing,” Em keeps saying.

We were living full-time in Toronto when Trump was elected president and Em blamed those Democrats who didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton. If there was ever a time for a FUCK THE DEMOCRATS sign, I feared this was it. But Em already knew a sign like that could be misunderstood; she didn’t want to be mistaken for a Trump supporter. Besides, our dry cleaning in Toronto was returned to us on hangers—no more shirt cardboards. I should have known. You can’t have enough GOOD RIDDANCE signs.

In December 2017—two days after my seventy-sixth birthday—I found The New York Times in disarray on our kitchen table, where Em had abandoned her uneaten breakfast. Enough time had passed since the Reagan obituary—Em was reading the Times again. (I was reading the Toronto Star; it was a good way to learn about the city.) I saw that the Times was open to another obituary. Cardinal Bernard Law had died in Rome. The former archbishop of Boston, the cardinal who covered up all those child molestations by priests, was gone. If there was ever a time for a GOOD RIDDANCE sign, here it was.

I saw the torn-apart cardboard carton on the kitchen floor—a box from Blood Brothers Brewing; she’d taken one of the cardboard panels for her sign. I had an idea where Em would go with her message.