How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them. Took a mother’s leaving for you to know she’d ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everything, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil she had to drop into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up. Or Lowell. When she’d had Lowell—if she could say she ever had, and she guessed she hadn’t, really—but while he’d been there, anyway, he’d been a little like that—