called his stepdaughter. “My sometime stepdaughter,” he thought of Debbie and spoke of her to himself in that term. He felt poetic when he said that—Shakespearean, really, though had others heard him, they would have thought that he was talking nonsense. No one called their divorced spouses “my sometime wife” or “my sometime husband.” No one called their contacts on Facebook—old schoolmates and former colleagues—“my sometime friends.” But that was one phrase Gordon often used when he thought of people in his life.
