We stand in the school corridor, waiting for our children to emerge from their classrooms. Almost daily we start a conversation with resumed warmth, but it’s often rearranged by another parent whom Adele welcomes. She extends an arm, brings the parent close, wants to know how she is. Sometimes, with no chance to catch up, first- and second-graders a rush between and around us, we just embrace, but it’s a generous pause in my day. After twenty years in Missoula, nearly, my days contain these brief and crucial flirts, gestures of belonging. A row ahead at the movies, say, is a surgeon I consulted, with his girlfriend, the receptionist at Daniel’s high school. His ex-wife gets her hair cut where I do. I wave outside Food Farm to the woman who owned a bookstore. Now she does massage. I pull over with a flat tire, and the person who stops to help used to run the food bank where I volunteered. The rustle of people in this small city is a flag of stitched and overlapping roles, coincident eras.
