“You must be my snowboarder.” Those were the first words Hilary Baxter spoke to me when she opened the door to her boarding house. On that gray day when she found me leaning on a pair of crutches on her front porch—back when I thought of her only as my landlady.
“Not anymore,” I said.
She said nothing, but looked me up and down, her gaze starting at the top of my head and ending at my foot—the one foot I still I had. To my surprise, she didn’t linger at the place where my other leg stopped abruptly, not like most people do when they first see me. Nor did she want to know what happened to cause that abrupt stop, like most people do.
“You’re awfully tall for a snowboarder,” was all she said. “I guess I was expecting someone more like five-two or five-three. You must be at least five-eight
