Before she was eight.
The short squat man in the blue sports coat and gray slacks who along with the woman who made her face into an attractive mask told his daughter that the little girl’s real parents did not want her so they bought her instead.
The little girl imagining herself picked off a shelf in a petshop.
The only thing you remember this man for nowadays is the influence he exerted over your wife’s life.
Continues to exert.
Even though your wife has never looked back, needless to say.
Even though it was a very long time ago.
Because the only feeling you experience tonight — rotating this photograph, canting it this way and that in your office — the only feeling you experience tonight is the long slow beat of loss.
Kysha was the first person on staff at Digitalus to wear a silver stud through her tongue.
This is Kysha.
This is who she is.
You cannot help being impressed.
Impressed and — in complex, if easy to articulate, ways — envious.
Kysha does not change by changing.
She cuts her hair disturbingly short, spikes it, and colors it differently on a weekly basis.
Burgundy, peacock blue, moss green with canary highlights.
She wears baggy black things.
She wears baggy black things and listens to frig bands and Frank Sinatra and makes references to magazines and movies you have never heard of.
Every other word she pronounces sounds bookended with quotation marks.
As if she is reading one of Zach’s office memos out loud.
All of which, you realized when you met her husband, represents the opposite of who Kysha is.
Her husband, Thom, being clean-shaven and wearing tan khakis and light blue shirts and slicked-back hair and turtle-shell glasses.
He looks as if he does other people’s finances for a living.
Which, in point of fact, is what he does.
Kysha and Thom live in River Edge, a tree-dense suburb of shady streets and chemically luxurious lawns. They are happily married. They have two kids. They drive a Ford Explorer.
A Ford Explorer or a Nissan Pathfinder.
Most SUV’s appearing to be the same SUV, only in different colors.
It took you almost a year to figure out why Kysha strikes such an ironic, hip pose.
She strikes such an ironic, hip pose because she is so unironic and unhip.
She strikes such an ironic, hip pose because she longs for the antithesis of irony and hipness.
Kysha being the kind of person who wears one identity at home and another at work, the one she wears at work saying back off, not because she would wither you with an arched eyebrow if you did not back off, but because she might blush.
If you stepped up behind her in the hall and said boo, she is the kind of person who would leap to the side and duck in a single gesture, thereby hurting her shoulder against the wall.
Andi has a theory about her.
Andi’s theory maintains Kysha secretly reads romance novels before going to bed every night.
You tend to think Andi has a point.
Now something is wrong.
Now Kysha and Thom are on their way to Seattle for a working vacation.
They have decided to fly into Spokane one afternoon, rent a car, and drive to Coeur D’Alene in the northern panhandle to meet you and Andi for dinner.
To see, as Kysha tells you over the phone, what kind of memories one can collect in a place where nothing happens.
You wanting to hug her when she says something like that.
When she says something like that, you wanting to put your arms around her and tell her everything is going to be okay, really.
You fail to tell them Andi will not be accompanying you until you show up alone in the lobby of the resort hotel where they are staying.
The one with a marina on the lake.
Andi is having a rough final trimester, you explain. She is nauseated around the clock. Her lower back aches. You could go on and on, but you will not.
The point being, these maladies notwithstanding, Andi planned to join you right up until the minute you were both supposed to dress this afternoon, then she suggested you drive up without her.
You say.
She sends Kysha and Thom her love and hopes they understand.
They do.
They display precisely the appropriate amount of concern stirred in with discretion.
You continue to elaborate on Andi’s symptoms as you escort them out of the resort and pause near the front entrance to look at the wide dark-blue lake surrounded by low-pined mountains.
There are worse things than living in a museum, you tell them, looking.
Not living in a museum, for instance.
You point out that Coeur D’Alene has the largest floating golf course geen in the northwest.
Northwest or world.
You cannot remember which.
The air is frosty.
Because of poor local mining and farming practices, the lake is also one of the most polluted in the United States.
Nitrates.
Nitrates or nitrites.
The three of you meditate upon this and then cross the street to stroll along a row of one- and two-story brick shops that only appear in tourist towns trying to look like they are not tourist towns until you arrive at a restaurant on whose roof sits a shiny vintage car from the fifties.
After you take your seats and order drinks, you guide the conversation toward their lives.
You ask Kysha how things are going at work and she catches you up on all the office gossip which strikes you as tangibly less engaging at this distance than it was at close range.
You ask Thom about finances and learn that he is distantly involved with the plans to turn the Hanford site into a national theme park.
Ground has already been broken, he says.
The investment opportunities are staggering.
You concentrate on adjusting your facial muscles into interest until your huge cajun hamburgers and string fries arrive.
Then you redirect the conversation again, this time toward the topic of children.
Your friends are in rare form.
Kysha attains a tone so imbued with irony and hipness that it is impossible to determine whether she is honestly being ironic and hip or whether her heavy irony and hipness is so ironic and hip that it somehow cancels out its own irony and hipness.
Thom plays the double-take stooge.
You find yourself laughing less at Kysha’s actual pronouncements than at the tone of her delivery and Thom’s reaction to what she says.
She points out that the biggest problem with having small children is not being able to plan their colds at least three weeks in advance.
Thom freezes, cajun hamburger midway to mouth, and gawks at her like a conked-on-the-head klutz in a slapstick routine.
Kysha begins referring to her children as rug rats and Thom smacks himself on the forehead with the base of his palm in disbelief.
It is a shtik, grownup horseplay, the stuff that bonds them at a profound level.
Neither of them would know what to do without the other half of the act.
After dessert and coffee, you return to the resort and walk along the floating wooden docks to supervise the spectacular sunset over the lake.
The color blue one-hundred-percent lacking from the sky.
Everything tangerine, saffron, steak-center pink.
Not living in a museum, or living in a museum but not knowing you are living in a museum, for instance.
Somehow, though, Kysha does not notice or pretends not to notice, as if nature were an annoying special effect designed to interrupt good conversations.
She talking about how horrorstricken she is that through some inadvertent comment she will end up putting one or both of her children in therapy for the rest of their lives.