Peter and Zula were making a long weekend of it. They’d left Seattle after Zula had got off work and had fought traffic up to Snoqualmie Pass, where most of the skiers peeled off to ride the conventional lifts. Feeling more elite by the minute, they had blasted across the state to Spokane and then headed north toward Metaline Falls, a tiny border station up on a mountain pass that just happened to coincide with the forty-ninth parallel. Crossing about an hour before midnight, they drove through the pass to Elphinstone, and then turned south along the poorly marked, bumpy, meandering mountain track that inclined to the Schloss. This plan actually did not sound insane to them, and thus reminded Richard once more of his advanced age. During the hours they’d been on the road, he’d found himself unable to stray from his computer, calculating which dangerous road they were driving down at a particular time, as if Zula were a part of his body that had gone off on its own and that needed to be kept track of. This, he supposed, was what it was like to be a parent. And as ridiculous as it was, he found himself haunted by thoughts of the re-u. For if Zula and Peter did have a crash on the way over, then later, when the story was told and retold at the re-u, laid like a brick into the family lore, it would be largely about Richard, when he’d learned of it, what actions he’d taken, the cool head he’d displayed, the correct decisions he’d made to manage it all, Zula’s relief when he had showed up at the hospital. The moral was preordained: the family took care of itself, even, no, especially in times of crisis, and consisted of good, wise, competent people. He might have to steer to the required denouement on slick and turning ways, through a whiteout. Just when he had been getting ready to pull ski pants over his pajamas and go out looking for them, they had arrived, precisely on their announced schedule, in Peter’s annoyingly hip, boxy vehicle, and then Richard had stopped seeing them as crazy wayward kids and thought them superhuman with their GPS telephones and Google Maps.