After Surfing Ocean Beach. Mary Soderstrom

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      For my sister

      Laurie M. Down

      1946–2002

      Rick

      It is true that I wasn’t functioning very well by the time I got to the complex where Lil was going to move. The time between mid-November and New Year’s is always busy when you have a restaurant, and that year it was the usual multiplied by ten. So much has happened since then, both in my life and in the world, that all the plans to celebrate the end of the twentieth century seem trivial in retrospect, but at the time the countdown to the millennium was both exciting and one hell of a lot of work.

      That’s why I was travelling that first weekend in December. It was the only window of time I had to check things out for my stepmother and then help her move. Thanksgiving was safely over—we’d been fully booked all four days of the holiday weekend—and the Christmas and New Year’s rush hadn’t quite started.

      The plan was for me to catch an afternoon flight from Albany, change in Detroit, and then go on to L.A. I’d get an evening flight to San Diego, where I’d rent a car at the airport. Then I’d go by and see Lil at the house. I planned on staying the night in a motel, however. She had invited me to stay with her, but I’d ducked the invitation. After my mother died I never liked staying in the house, and besides, I decided it would be good for Lil and me not to be in each other’s pockets. She had made the arrangements for movers, she had file folders of information that she’d photocopied and sent to me, but I knew there’d be some—well, “organizing” is what my wife, Jenny, would call it—for me to do. I didn’t want to argue with Lil and then have to sit around in the evening watching television with her.

      Don’t get me wrong, I would be the first to say that Lil’s one hell of a fine woman. My father was lucky when she agreed to marry him. She kept him on his toes and brought him into the l990s. She didn’t take any guff from him, either, which is what he needed, I see now.

      What I did not need that day in December was a snowstorm, but I got one, nevertheless.

      Kingston gets mountains of snow every winter, and when people learn that I grew up in California, they ask me why I ever left. I tell them that things are better here than the first place I went after I left the West Coast. My former wife was from Montreal, and she talked me into going there. Big mistake, I always say, but I leave it hanging whether I mean Caroline or Montreal or both.

      So that Saturday there was a lot of snow. When I left the house at about 4:00 A.M. an inch already covered the pavement, and by the time Jenny came to the restaurant to take me to the airport at a little after noon the snow was a foot and a half deep where the plows hadn’t yet passed.

      We live on the same property as my restaurant, Chez Cassis, which means that Jenny and Cassis—our daughter, the restaurant’s named after her—only had to drive out to the main road and then turn into the restaurant drive to come pick me up. It should have been a piece of cake, even with the snow.

      The guy who plows most of the driveways along this stretch of the highway was asleep at the switch, though. He’s a second cousin of Jenny’s, and her father, who runs road construction around here, got him the job, but the fool hadn’t gotten around to putting his plow on the front of his pickup. He had to spend at least an hour getting it attached, and then it wasn’t on right, so he couldn’t get it to lower all the way. When Jenny came down the drive in her Jeep, he was stopped halfway, tinkering with the lift bar.

      Even that shouldn’t have meant a problem: Jenny knows how to drive under winter conditions. We got the Jeep for its four-wheel drive back before SUVs became popular just so she wouldn’t have to miss any court dates because of the weather, so she could get into New York or Albany or wherever with no problem. So she took one look at her cousin and another at her watch, and she dropped into four-wheel mode and turned off the drive onto the lawn.

      I was at the window so I saw her churn though the snow that the guy had succeeded in pushing up off the drive, but I bent

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