You can make them up yourself and be right. I think we both believed that we were in a fog we couldn’t see through yet, though in a while, maybe not even a long while, we would see lights and know something.

In my third-period class that day a messenger brought a note for me that said I was excused from school at noon, and I should meet my mother at a motel down 10th Avenue South—a place not so far from my school—and we would eat lunch together.

It was a gray day in Great Falls that day. The leaves were off the trees and the mountains to the east of town were obscured by a low sky. The night before had been cold and clear, but today it seemed as if it would rain. It was the beginning of winter in earnest. In a few days there would be snow everywhere.

The motel where my mother was staying was called the Tropicana, and was beside the city golf course. There was a neon parrot on the sign out front, and the cabins made a U shape behind a little white office building. Only a couple of cars were parked in front of cabins, and no car was in front of my mother’s cabin. I wondered if Woody would be here, or if he was at the air base. I wondered if my father would see him there, and what they would say.

I walked back to cabin 9. The door was open, though a DO NOT DISTURB sign was hung on the knob outside. I looked through the screen and saw my mother sitting on the bed alone. The television was on, but she was looking at me. She was wearing the powder-blue dress she had had on the night before. She was smiling at me, and I liked the way she looked at that moment, through the screen, in shadows. Her features did not seem as sharp as they had before. She looked comfortable where she was, and I felt like we were going to get along, no matter what had happened, and that I wasn’t mad at her—that I had never been mad at her.

She sat forward and turned the television off. “Come in, Jackie,” she said, and I opened the screen door and came inside. “It’s the height of grandeur in here, isn’t it?” My mother looked around the room. Her suitcase was open on the floor by the bathroom door, which I could see through and out the window onto the golf course, where three men were playing under the milky sky. “Privacy can be a burden, sometimes,” she said, and reached down and put on her high-heeled shoes. “I didn’t sleep very well last night, did you?”

“No,” I said, though I had slept all right. I wanted to ask her where Woody was, but it occurred to me at that moment that he was gone now and wouldn’t be back, that she wasn’t thinking in terms of him and didn’t care where he was or ever would be.

“I’d like a nice compliment from you,” she said. “Do you have one of those to spend?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”

“That’s a nice one,” she said and nodded. She had both her shoes on now. “Would you like to go have lunch? We can walk across the street to the cafeteria. You can get hot food.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not really hungry now.”

“That’s okay,” she said and smiled at me again. And, as I said before, I liked the way she looked.