He held up a small, tarnished thing: a Cub Scout pinewood derby car, painted red, one wheel gone.

“She kept it,” he said.

“My car.

I was eight.” And I said, before I could stop myself, “You cried because Dad sanded it too thin and it lost every heat,” and Terry looked at me, startled, because he had not expected me to remember, and for one second the nine years fell away and we were two kids in this kitchen again, and he laughed for real, and I laughed, and then we both stopped at the same moment because laughing felt like a betrayal of something, though neither of us could have said of what.

But it had happened.