I) Think if you must about deserted Midwestern streets covered in a soft snowfall. People leaving parties—the noise behind them as they arrive into the silence of the town late at night. Think if you must of Midwestern winter evenings of yore, of bridge parties at fold-up tables; mink stoles draped over cool white shoulders; black rubber galoshes yanked tight over the polished toes of fine dress shoes.

J) Watching the drive-in movie, an updated version of The Absent Minded Professor in which a green unearthly goo wobbles across the screen, you think of your life as flexing green stuff generated by computer animation, yet as real as anything—of the moment—and filling Maggie with soft contralto giggles, infectious giggles. The smile your face provides in response—for her and only for her—makes your jaw hurt. Ron reaches over to touch your hand. Through his touch you are made aware that your fingers are small and delicate and fragile, and they remind you, for some reason, of the embroidery your great-grandmother stitched by hand: her house up there near Lake Huron, clapboards under the daunting gaze of northern summers, the lake glistening bits of fire from a sky bone-white with sun.

K) Your uncle found reels of Super 8 footage in the attic and had them committed to video, to the television screen: there was your father, a young kid in swim trunks dangling his feet over the edge of a dock while behind him cold Canadian waters drew back to a line of trees from which a thin twirl of smoke slithered (always a single campfire up in the tree line). Elegant on the end of the dock, the boys are firm-boned, baring themselves up against time, hair slicked back and bodies perfect. The film reel jolts to an end and is replaced by another, different time and place, different color gradients, different vacation; same hard gorgeous bodies and slicked-back hair and cold clear lake behind the dock, but this time with a Cris Craft, flag aflutter, spreading a wide wake as your father skis before a different tree line, towering spruce melding into dark blue backdrop. The reel jolts to an end, changes again, and an Indian guide (always an Indian guide, your father once explained) on his haunches pokes the tip of a twig into the smoldering coals, puffing his cheeks as he blows; behind him your regal grandmother from Toledo draws as much elegance from the scene as she can, adjusting the shoulder of her raccoon shawl. Then your father appears in the frame dressed in a plaid shirt, mirroring a thousand future ads for sportswear, blissfully letting his gaze enter the lens and the future and daring you, just daring you, to betray eternity.

L) It’s those eyes—your father’s on the dock in Canada—that you see in hers, when you meet on the pine swamp trail. The brown of a polished hickory gun butt, rubbed shiny with warm beeswax.

M)—I’d like to see you again.

—Me, too.