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and Miriam and her friends,someone laughing out loud at the silly snow, if it comes now there’ll be none left next weekend for the wedding! Big Ed and I can’t make a sound. But Yo sees us standing there, like that, and she comes so quick …”
    “Yo … you told her?”
    “What could I do?”
    And the house door bangs open in the hall, the front door and Gabriel’s mother is there, tall black-haired Yolanda who blessings be always knows what to do is striding into the house where their family of five has lived for fifteen years, and also Gabriel’s older sister Miriam and younger brother Dennis and soon to be brother-in-law Leo; Leo closing the door very quietly while what’s left of their little family swarms him, the missing father found at last: calling him, groaning, crying aloud together.

    Slivered onions spat in the pan and he sliced in cooked potatoes to calm them. He got two eggs from the fridge. They spread out white and yellow quick, he stirred and shifted and flipped, then went back for a third egg, white as snow, wash me and I shall be whiter—cooking heat such a gentle sound, a soft reassurance. He sprinkled in chopped beer sausage, then shredded cheddar and slowly his random gestures melted into the fragrance of
Kaeseueberbacken
, cheese-baked-over, as they called it in the Marburg University student
Mensa
, though this was really
ueberbraten
—fried-over, his comfort food, his desperately seeking comfort. He could check his e-mail for whatever would never be there, he could surely call Miriam in Vancouver or Dennis inToronto and talk face to face, this was exactly why Dennis had insisted on setting up his Skype—but he had no words he could bear now, leave alone face faces, even electronic. This ruthless memory, he had buried it forever, he vowed so often, buried finally with his only Yolanda, enough, enough already! they had agreed together again and over again and then out of nowhere their beautiful son was between them again. Every relentless bit and scratch and word of him they could only rub against each other, concentrating and remembering and reminding, scraps and tag-ends streaming together while they scraped themselves even rawer, shred by shred they again talked their son into previously noticed and unnoticed existences; as if they would build a gigantic wall along the cliffs and ridges, over the tips of the highest most savagely broken mountains or the deepest river gorges and horizonless prairies of their past until they had again piled up every tiny grain of possible fact into an impregnable wall against every possible … and then her life stopped. She was gone too.
    Blessed are you, Yolanda. Now you know.
    Together over fifty years and gone. Gabriel only twenty-four and a half—though that was certainly enough, more than enough to need to remember. As Hal had watched Yo’s final smoke vanish in blue sky he had vowed, on the memory of Gabriel’s smoke and ashes, to wring every remembrance of Gabriel down tight into absolute refusal: NO MORE. Gabe would now be the black hole in his universe of memory. Not even sleep would betray him into one shard of dream, enough now, that past was completed and forever somewhere beyond this life and now Yoeternally knew all of it; he need only wait until he too was smoke and ashes and he too would know, he would not continue here like a stunned idiot pursued by these hounds of recall. Leave it. Think nothing.
    And then today. Before he could defend himself memory walked past the Double Cup window. He had stared at it—stupidly. And he recognized he had been waiting to see that, sitting there over the months so deliberately blank and empty but actually waiting … now he stared down at the dark circle of cheese in the frying pan. There was a smell of something singed. Safe, the coffee shop had always seemed meaninglessly nothing, safe … but like a stupid shit—the screaming woman in the pickup named him all right—he jumped up and ran