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She asked, the week after she got home, whether we could go in the winter.

We. All three of us.

I said yes before I had worked out how.

Guerra has a name for it now. It is not the worst name on the list he gave us in April and it is not nothing, and it is not going to improve.

What it means in this house is that there are days the left hand is a hand and days it is a thing he carries. He has stopped narrating which. I have stopped asking before he offers.

He is in that building four mornings a week for no money, teaching teenagers to move their feet before their hands, and Ryan has given up pretending this was ever a temporary arrangement.

Last month a junior team in Oklahoma called him about an assistant job. He turned it down without telling me, and then told me he had turned it down without telling me, which I have decided to count.

Mack flew to Kansas City in July to interview with the Frontiers for one more year on the ice. They talked to him for an afternoon and offered him a job behind the bench instead. Quinn and his agent spent a week making sure it was a good one. Quinn does not let anybody sign a bad one, even when he is not her client. Colt drove him to the airport and came home and did not say anything for an hour, which for him is a eulogy.

Tonight Tova is in the front room with her homework and Colt is doing something to a cabinet door that did not need doing.

I open the drawer in her room looking for the European adaptor, because she will need it in December and I would rather find it in September.

The adaptor is underneath a folded sheet of printer paper.

A different one.

Four figures this time. Tova, enormous. Colt, absurdly tall. My hair still the yellow of a highway line. And an old woman in the corner of the page, drawn smaller than the rest of us and closer to the front, with a tissue in one hand.

I fold it along her crease and put it back where it was, and I take the adaptor, and I go downstairs.

Colt is still at the cabinet.

“I found a drawing in her drawer.”

He stops with the screwdriver against the hinge.

“The three of us behind the counter.”

I look at him.

“You found one too.”

“Under her backpack. The sofa one.” He puts the screwdriver down. “I’m in a jersey.”

“You put it back.”

“Same crease.”

“So did I.”

Neither of us says anything for a moment.

“There is a new one.”

“Yeah?”

“My mother is in it.”

Something goes across his face that I will not describe to him.

“Is she small?”