“Dear, please don’t ask me why I didn’t tell you this earlier. You always do that. I’ve told you this so many times, and every time you are stunned and swear you won’t forget. But then the memory recedes for you and you don’t know me again. You can’t remember me making you lunch when you were five, or tying your shoes for you, or helping you through the awkward lessons of puberty, or even where I keep the silverware.”

“Where is the silverware drawer?”

“I don’t have one, dear. You knew that once. I have a silverware trapdoor. It’s under one of the hot milk drawers.”

“Under the hot milk drawer.” Jackie tried to say this as though it were something she was finally remembering, and not something she had just learned.

She thought about Diane and she thought about Josh, and Diane’s face when she found out that Josh was missing.

Good for him, she had thought, even as she had sympathized with Diane’s pain.

[bottomless chasm of regret and pain], she thought now, thinking back on it. Jackie loved Diane for missing Josh. She loved Diane for living her life in spite of Troy.

She also felt more uneasy about Diane now. Was she a mother, a friend, a sister, a stranger? Jackie didn’t know how to proceed with this new knowledge.

Diane experienced time in a normal progression. Her memories were immediate and consistent. Her actions begat reactions and consequences. She could feel the terror of loss or the fear of pain or develop complicated and loving relationships with those around her. Jackie could not. Even things that had happened moments ago would start to fade away into long-ago distance for her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she took her mom in her arms. She held her tight, as though this would keep their experience of time from diverging. “I’m sorry I don’t remember, Mom.”

Lucinda smiled.

“You will age someday, dear. We all age. Some of us take longer than others. You are always nineteen now. Someday you will never be nineteen.”

Jackie moved over to the couch to sit next to her mom. The couch was spotless. Her mother just really liked things clean.

“I’ll remember for as long as I can,” she said.

She hugged her mom tight, and, after a moment, her mom reciprocated.

“I’m sorry that it was this way, Mom. Not I’m sorry like an apology. I’m sorry as in sorrow.”

“Me too, dear. Me too so very much. Oh, I suppose you should have this.”

She opened a drawer in the coffee table and rummaged around. Finally she pulled out an old photo. An extremely old photo, yellowing and cracked, and bending at the edges. In it, there was a man who was definitely Troy. He had his arm around a little girl.

“That’s you and your father.”