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through the rain forest and a clever mother who packed a tree in a suitcase and a focused teenager who, whatever delights we placed before him, never once smiled. And it seems perfect; at least the ten-minute version of the weeklong trip seems perfect.
    Another family trip to the mountains of Pennsylvania was intended to be idyllic. A high school graduation trip for me—with family. My brother brought a friend, Tom Rief; my sister brought a friend, Harriet Windley. I, fortunately, did not bring anyone. The place my father had chosen, from a classified advertisement in the Washington Post , was a “serene three bedroom mountain cabin overlooking a meadow” for a mere $75 a week. Even in 1967, this low price should have been a warning. We loaded the girls in one car, with the food, and the boys in the other car, with the dog—who threw up the whole way, an omen of things to come. When we reached the serene cabin, it was just an old clapboard farmhouse in need of paint across from its burned-out barn, and the meadow was a pasture shared with loud, skittish cows (making the dog quite happy) that led down a slope to the visible and busy interstate highway. Look out the front door and there was the black carcass of the barn. Look out the back door and there was the interstate. We did every activity the town and the neighboring borough had to offer—dancing at the firehouse (the only male who approached us to dance had two abscessed front teeth), skating at the roller rink (the fellow with whom I skated thought California was closer to Virginia where we lived than Virginia was to Pennsylvania), and going to the movies (where the seven of us accounted for more than three-quarters of the audience). So we spent most of the vacation at the farmhouse, listening to “The Arkansas Traveler” from the farmhouse's old 78 RPM records—the only music—and watching the wheelchair in which my mother, who had broken her ankle the day before my high school graduation, sat roll uncontrollably down the uneven floor to crash into the sink. Upstairs our preoccupation was killing an unending stream of flies. Even this truly miserable vacation—we couldn't make it the whole week—takes on a luster. Far from perfect, perhaps, but solar systems better than the seemingly unending misery of the real thing.
    So maybe it is not surprising that my sense of life before 1996 is radiant. Braiding Cate's hair or finding a Jams shirt for Wade, making mock science tests for them, cleaning the playroom with them to a silly song I made up, watching them wrap Christmas presents for each other and watching them enjoy seeing their brother or sister unwrap what they had chosen, the first time they got up on skis, the spelling bee. It is easy enough to think that those days must have been magical and perfect. The ten-minute version is undeniably perfect. We had a picture-postcard family in a picture-postcard house, and life had played out precisely as I had dreamed it would. And in my house, I literally walked around singing the songs of Jo Stafford and the Andrews Sisters.
    We had enough money that we didn't have to worry so much about our mortgage or whether the car needed new wheel bearings, but we hadn't had enough money (or hadn't had it long enough) to think that hiring people to manage our lives made any sense, so it was just the four of us, at dinner, at basketball games, at soccer practice, trimming the tree. A beautiful foursome with a golden retriever to boot. A husband I adored, a life that I thought challenged him professionally and home that fed him emotionally, and these unspeakably marvelous children. It was perfect, and I was content in my memory of life before Wade died. But to let myself fall into that fiction is not fair to today. Today will always fall short of perfection, just as yesterday—we might not remember—did.
    What was perfect then that cannot be replaced is that Wade was here, a six-foot, freckle-faced, living, breathing boy