Is that the woman from Phoenix?”

“Keep your voice down.”

And eleven years came apart in my hands.

Because I remembered Phoenix.

I remembered it very well, and I had remembered it, for eleven years, as one of the good ones.

We had had the worst fight of our marriage in the spring of that year.

It had been about my mother — about whether we were going to spend three weeks of the summer in Mexico City with her, which I wanted and he did not, and it had gone from that into every other unresolved thing in the way those fights do, and it had ended with him sleeping in the spare room for two nights.

Then he went to Phoenix for four days for a distributor conference.