My best friend, a girl named Catherine, was being raised by her grandparents, whom she called Nanny and Pap. Her family situation was complicated. Her mother lived just down the street with her new husband, and Catherine—a souvenir from her previous entanglement—had been deemed unfit to follow.
 
Look, Catherine whispered to me once. We were probably nine and eight, respectively. That's my mother.

She pointed out the window, and I followed her fingertip. It landed on a willowy lady with a dark plait trailing down her back. She was about to cross the road.

I love seeing her, said Catherine. Isn't she so pretty?

Does she ever come visit? I asked.

She's very busy. Plus, there's the new baby.

I looked at Catherine sideways, at her smile, her palm pressed to the glass, like she was willing it to melt. I decided that I hated Catherine's mother more than my father hated commies.

I glimpsed the woman again a few days later, this time in the dairy aisle of the grocery store.

"Excuse me," she said, wheeling her cart carefully around me. She plucked a stick of butter from the shelf.

She seemed terribly normal, which unsettled me. I figured something inside her must have turned, like raw chicken in a broken freezer. I was seized by the sudden fear that whatever had gone bad in Catherine's mother would go bad in mine, too. Maybe I could make the house colder to preserve her attachment to me, wherever in her body it was stored. Probably, if I had to guess, in the hands.


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