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I stared at her.

“Who are you and what have you done with my mother?”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

She stood, smoothing her slacks.

“Your father made pancakes.”

“Daddy made pancakes?”

“He opened a box.”

Bitsy picked up her coffee, headed toward the screen door, then glanced back at me.

“Wash your face before you come over. Your father worries about you when you cry.”

“You don’t?”

“Of course I do. I simply find worrying more useful after breakfast.”

Then she crossed the lawn, leaving me alone with the notebook.

I waited until the kitchen door closed behind her before opening it again. The smeared words were still there.

They were mine.

They were real.

Below them sat the unfinished sentences about Claire and Ben, each one stopping exactly where I’d tried too hard to hold on.

I thought about yesterday. Dean’s truck rattling down country roads while rain gathered over the cornfields. His hair curling damply against his forehead. The two of us arguing over directions, Otis barking at a goat, Dean’s hand reaching past mine for a box of records. The two of us talking about Side A and Minneapolis and what another store might look like one day.

For that whole day I hadn’t been simply remembering Dean, I’d been with him. There was a difference, and it frightened me now.

Since arriving in 1984, I’d thought of this life as something borrowed, thirteen days I’d somehow been allowed to walk through before choosing whether to keep the future I knew or risk another one.

Yesterday hadn’t felt borrowed. It had felt ordinary, and that was what made it worrisome.

I didn’t believe Dean was somehow causing the memories to disappear, I knew better than that. The fading had begun that first day, and there had been enough strange rules already without inventing one where the universe kept score every time I enjoyed another man’s company. But something had changed in me. I was becoming attached to this life.

To working at Side A, to mornings when my father tried to make me pancakes and my mother asked why I was crying, and to Dean. And as 1984 became more solid beneath my feet, 2011 seemed to be moving farther away.

I looked down at the notebook and tried once more to remember what Claire did with her nose when she was holding back laughter, but it was gone.

I closed the notebook and held it against my chest. I was losing them.

12

Lorrie

Monday — August 20, 1984

I arrived at work little before eleven with my hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing a white cotton skirt, blue T-shirt, and my favorite Keds.

As I parked, a city bus pulled away from the curb, leaving behind the smell of diesel, while two girls in matching Wisconsin T-shirts stood outside a bookstore comparing schedules for fall semester. Somewhere farther down the block, a radio played “What’s Love Got to Do with It” loudly enough that Tina Turner followed me through Side A’s open door.

Dean was behind the counter with the phone tucked between his shoulder and ear, writing something on the back of an invoice while Brian took the trash out back.