He looked around, but nobody agreed or disagreed with him. We waited while he stared at the cracked cup steaming beside him. The gray light of the room aged us all and gave us a kind of dignity.

“It was nice up there.” He curled his hands around the cup. “I wrote you a letter, I think. I was learning a lot. Lichtenstein was teaching me. But also just the air and the trees and the steepness of the hill had things to teach me. I was feeling good. Better all the time. I felt the best of my life about a half an hour before the baby died. But when that happened I half thought this one bad thing should negate all the good things I was learning. All the beauty there was.”

Carlotta snorted loudly. She turned onto her side, facing away from us.

“Now, I don’t know,” Sam continued, watching her. “I wish you could have been there, but … It was just the best day. There’d been snow for a while, but we could see valleys from the stoop that were still bare. Then this day the sky cleared and it was almost warm. We took off our shirts and sat outside after supper. I was sitting on a stump with my shoes in snow and my shirt off, getting a tan. If it hadn’t been so windy I’d have sweated, really!”

I slid down onto the floor.

“We were never there, Han Shan,” Rennel said. “Was it really cold?”

Sam smiled. “I keep forgetting that you don’t know anything about the place. That’s at least partially because I thought so much about you both while we were up there. I really wanted you to come and I kept having imaginary conversations with you. I’d get very involved in explaining to you everything I was doing.”

Sam giggled softly, shook his head. Carlotta wore a pair of Levi’s and Sam’s work shirt. Her hip bones poked sharply through the denim. Her pale feet were piled at the ends of her pant legs. Her thinness hurt to look at.