Joni Mitchell was keening Little Green on Sils's record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and oos of the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. “Little green, be a gypsy dancer.” Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people's arms, turned toward the corner stereo and sang in a show of memory and surprise. All the women knew the words, every last one of them, and it shocked the men.

I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees -- I swore on Estherina Foster's frave -- that I would. But it wouldn't be a boy like Mike. Nobody like that. It would be a boy very far away – and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead.

I can’t give my heart away to anyone but you,” Daniel said to me in the hospital.  “Not that I haven’t tried, of course. It’s just that when I do, the other organs start a letter-writing campaign.”