I drive us home, since driving is another thing he hasn’t had to do in a while. I wonder if this is going to become a regular thing, spending time with him. Or if, the moment Mom is gone, he will be too.

“I will be here as long as you want me,” he says. “Not every minute, by your way of seeing things, but in a sense I will always be with you.”

“It’s a time thing, right? Yeah, Mom tried to explain.”

“For you, time is like a line drawn across a piece of paper, a succession of events. A to B

to C, one moment following another. Where I come from, there are no lines. We are the paper.”

“Okay, totally confused now.” I pull over into the Rainy Creek Country Store, a gas station.

“You’ll understand, someday.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Swan Valley. You’ve got to taste their square ice-cream cones.”

“Square ice-cream cones?” he repeats, blank-faced again, like this must be another newfangled thing he hasn’t learned about yet.

“See, you don’t know everything. I get to teach you something, too.” We get our ice-cream cones, made with special scoopers that shape the ice cream into perfect squares. Dad chooses chocolate mint. I go for strawberry.

“When you were small, you were my strawberry girl,” he says as we’re leaving the store.

“Your mom planted a patch in the backyard in Mountain View and if we couldn’t find you, that’s often where you’d be, eating strawberries, smeared with juice. Your mother had quite the time getting the stains out of all your tiny outfits.”

“I don’t remember.” I walk around to behind the building where there’s a bench to sit on.

I sit. He stands behind me for a minute, then sits next to me. We look out in the fading light at the mountains, listening to the voice of a small stream gurgling not too far away, the sounds of cars passing on the highway, which sets a kind of rhythm. “I don’t remember much,” I admit.

“I know. You were very small.”

“I remember you shaving.”

He smiles. “Yes. You were fascinated with that. You wanted to do it yourself. Your mother came up with the ingenious idea of cutting up old credit cards into the shape of razors, so then you sat up on the bathroom counter and shaved along with me.”

“Weird that an angel would have to shave.”

He rubs a hand over his smooth chin. “I don’t. Although sometimes, in my profession, I’m required to wear a beard.”

His profession. I turn the word over in my mind.

“In those days, with your mother, things were different for me, physically speaking. I had to shave, wash my body, eat, and drink.”

“And you don’t now?”

“I can. But I don’t have to.” He takes a big bite of his ice cream, crunching the cone. It dribbles down his chin, and he tries to wipe at it. I hand him a napkin.

“Because you have a different body.”

“There are two parts, to all of us,” he says. “Body and spirit.”

“So the body is real. And the spirit is . . . ghostly,” I say.

“In humans. The body is solid, and the spirit, translucent. Until the two separate, and the body returns to dust, and the spirit passes to another plane. Then the spirit becomes solid.”

“What about me?” I ask. “What’s my spirit like? Can you see it?”

“Beautiful.” He smiles. “You have a gorgeous spirit. Like your mother’s.” It’s fully dark now. A few feet away a lone cricket starts to chirp. We should go, I think.

It’s still more than an hour’s drive to home. But I don’t get up.

“Will Mom . . . go to heaven?”

He nods, and something in his face brightens. He’s happy, I realize, about her dying.

Because in heaven he’ll probably get to see her all the time. He’s happy, but for my sake he tries to dampen it down, understand it from my point of view.

“Her body is fading now,” he says. “Soon she will give it up entirely.”

“Can I go and visit her?” Hope blooms in my chest. We can cross, I know we can, back and forth from heaven and earth. Mom’s already been to heaven at least once. I could go there. It wouldn’t feel so terrible if I could see Mom every now and then, talk to her. Fill up on her advice and her jokes and her witty remarks. I could still have my mom.

“You can travel to heaven,” Dad says. “As a Triplare, you have the ability to cross between worlds. Dimidius must have help, but historically the Triplare can learn to travel there alone.”

I almost laugh, this is such good news.

“But you are unlikely to see your mother,” he says then. “She has her own journey to undertake when she arrives, and you cannot accompany her.”

“But why?” I know I must sound like a three-year-old, crying for my mama, but I can’t help it. I wipe at sudden, infuriating tears. I jump to my feet, hurl the rest of my ice-cream cone into the trash can behind us.

He doesn’t respond, which only makes me feel more embarrassed.

“We should go,” I tell him. “Everyone will be wondering where we went.” He finishes off the last of his cone and follows me back to the car. We drive in silence for the next half hour, past the glowing farmhouses tucked back from the roads, the silhouettes of horses in the fields, then up into the forest of lodgepole pines, past the YONDER IS JACKSON

HOLE sign at Teton Pass. Dad doesn’t seem angry, but like he’s respecting my need for space. I appreciate that, and resent it, at the same time. I resent that he can make me appreciate that, even though he thinks it’s perfectly okay to waltz back into my life and start dropping bombs on me.

And then I feel guilty that I resent him, because he’s an angel, and he’s the epitome of good.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally as we start to descend the hairpin turns into Jackson.

“I love you, Clara,” he says after a long moment. “I want you to feel that. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“And I promise, you will see your mother again.”

I remind myself that he’s the kind of guy who never breaks a promise.

It’s quiet at dinner, me and Dad and Jeffrey at the table. Jeffrey practically inhales his food to get away from us, which makes Dad sad, or as close to feeling sad as Dad is capable of.

“Nice talk, today,” he tells me as we’re loading dishes into the dishwasher. “I’ve wanted that with you.”