“I made you some pretty weird meals over the years. Peanut butter and anchovy sandwiches. Pate and beets on Ritz crackers. I think partly I wanted to see if there was anything you wouldn’t eat and partly I was trying to impress you with my culinary wizardry.”

　“How old was I?”

　“I think the oldest I have seen you was forty-something. I’m not sure about youngest; maybe about thirty? How old are you now?”

　“Twenty-eight.”

　“You look very young to me now. The last few years you were mostly in your early forties, and you seemed to be having kind of a rough life... It’s hard to say. When you’re little all adults seem big, and old.”

　“So what did we do? In the Meadow? That’s a lot of time, there.”

　Clare smiles. “We did lots of things. It changed depending on my age, and the weather. You spent a lot of time helping me do my homework. We played games. Mostly we just talked about stuff. When I was really young I thought you were an angel; I asked you a lot of questions about God. When I was a teenager I tried to get you to make love to me, and you never would, which of course made me much more determined about it. I think you thought you were going to warp me sexually, somehow. In some ways you were very parental.”

　“Oh. That’s probably good news but somehow at the moment I don’t seem to be wanting to be thought of as parental.” Our eyes meet. We both smile and we are conspirators. “What about winter? Michigan winters are pretty extreme.”

　“I used to smuggle you into our basement; the house has a huge basement with several rooms, and one of them is a storage room and the furnace is on the other side of the wall. We call it the Reading Room because all the useless old books and magazines are stored there. One time you were down there and we had a blizzard and nobody went to school or to work and I thought I was going to go crazy trying to get food for you because there wasn’t all that much food in the house. Etta was supposed to go grocery shopping when the storm hit. So you were stuck reading old Reader’s Digests for three days, living on sardines and ramen noodles.”

　“Sounds salty. I’ll look forward to it.” Our meal arrives. “Did you ever learn to cook?”

　“No, I don’t think I would claim to know how to cook.