No Andrea. My elbows find the bar, cheap sake (tastes of machine oil, brewed locally) finds me, and I scan the faces to be sure. But what is this I feel on the back of my neck? Dampness. Water. Ubiquitous water. I'm looking up, the ceiling tiles giving off a gentle ooze, and then down at the plastic bucket between my feet—I'm practically standing in it—when I feel a pressure on my arm. It's her hand, Andrea's hand, the feel of it round my biceps as binding as history. "Hello, Ty," she says, the bucket gently sloshing, the solid air rent by the blast of the speakers, the crowd gabbling, her unflinching eyes locked on mine. "Nice hat," she says.

I don't want to sound too cynical here, because time goes on and she's looking good, very good, eight or nine on a scale of ten, all things considered. Her mouth settles into a basket of grooves and lines when the smile fades, and her eyes are paler and duller than I remembered—and ever so slightly exophthalmic—but who's to quibble? She was a beauty then and she's a beauty still. She's wearing a print dress, low-cut of course, frilly sleeves, a quarter-inch of makeup, and her hair—dyed midnight black—bunches at her shoulders. She fixes on my eyes with that half-spacey, half-calculating wide-eyed look I know so well—or used to know. "Is there someplace we can talk?"

Two minutes later, we're in the back room, ordering up our tilapia sushi dinner—and talking. "Do you remember that girl, April Wind—she was about Sierra's age?" Andrea is watching my face, looking for the crack into which she can drive the first piton and begin her ascent to my poor quivering brain. I give her nothing. Nothing at all. My eyes are glass. My face a sculpture by Oldenburg, monumental, impenetrable. Sierra—the famous Sierra Tierwater—is my daughter. Was my daughter. April Wind I've never heard of. Or at least I hope I haven't.

"You remember her," Andrea insists, picking at her food with an absent squeeze of her chopsticks. Patting at her lips with the napkin, pausing to take a doleful sip of faintly greasy sake, the best the house has to offer. (Have I mentioned that grapes are a thing of the past? Napa-Sonoma is all rice paddies now, the Loire and Rhine Valleys so wet they'd be better off trying to grow pineapples—though on the plus side I hear the Norwegians are planting California rootstock in the Oslo suburbs.) "She came straight to us from Teo's Action Camp? Tiny, she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds? Asian. Or half Asian? She swore the trees talked to her, remember?"

The mention of Teo shoots a flaming brand into my gut where it ignites the wasabe lurking there in a gurry of carp roe and partially digested tilapia. "What about Teo?" I say, just as the wind comes up in a blast that shakes the place as if it were made of straw. "Is he still in the picture or what?"

"He's dead," Andrea says into the silence.

I feel expansive suddenly. I want details. Did he suffer?

Her smallest voice: "It was quick. I don't want to talk about it, because that's not why I—he was killed by a meteor, all right? He was making a soft-boiled egg. In the kitchen. He never knew what hit him."

I'm in awe. A soft-boiled egg! The world is a lonely place.

"Ty? Listen. The thing that got me here, the reason I had to see you, is April Wind. She wants to do a book. On Sierra."