We were supposed to leave in August. Sally wanted me to finish the school year at Gaynor, and meanwhile she had so much stuff to do before we’d be ready to go, I hardly ever saw her anymore. Besides the whole business of plane tickets and passports and clothes, and what to take and what to store, and what to do about the apartment, she had to keep on with her teaching and at the same time be looking around for somebody to take over for her. That was a thing, by the way. I don’t know how the singers were, but every one of the piano students went into major shock when she told them she was getting married and leaving the country. I’d never actually thought much about whether my mother was a good teacher or not—she was just Sally, it was what she did. Now, watching these grown people coming absolutely unglued at the idea of not being able to study with her anymore, as though she was the only piano teacher in the whole world, it suddenly made me look at her like someone else, a stranger. Practically everything was making me look at her that way, anyway, those days.

Like watching her with Evan. I haven’t put anything in about Evan so far, and I know I should have, I just kept feeling a little strange about it, even now. He’s about Sally’s age—which was middle forties then—and he’s not big, and he’s not good looking. He’s not bad looking, it’s just that you wouldn’t look at him twice on the street.