“You okay?” the desk clerk asked, leaning over the counter to peer at me. She twisted her watch around on her wrist anxiously.

I nodded. “Fine.” A lie. I got up and started to walk toward the door.

“It’s real terrible what happened over there in Elizabeth,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m real sorry about it.”

“Thanks.” I hurried out of the office as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to hear anyone else tell me they were sorry. What did I’m sorry mean, exactly, when someone had died? Wouldn’t it be much more accurate to say I’m grateful when someone close to you was hit by tragedy? I’m grateful, as in, I’m grateful that this didn’t happen to me. At least that would be honest.

I stood outside and looked up at the sky. The day was sunny and warm again, and here, twenty miles away from home, it almost seemed like a normal day. Except on a normal day I would be in chem class right now, excited about theater club practice and the lighting cues I still had to learn. On a normal day I would be seeing Mom tonight, would be telling Marin that I was too busy, too busy, always too busy.

I gazed down the line of motel room doors. Behind one of those, Ronnie was drowning in his own grief. Behind one of them, he was alone and I was alone, only feet apart, unable to talk about the things we needed to say.

I couldn’t go in there. Not yet.

Instead, I turned and walked down the sidewalk, Ronnie’s credit card in my pocket.

I wandered past a strip mall, which was filled with real estate offices and computer repair shops and dry cleaners, and headed toward a big chain pharmacy a short distance away. My clothes and shoes felt coarse and gross against my skin. I gazed at all the perfect buildings, the perfect people. Why had they been spared?

I stopped at the pharmacy and filled a cart with packages of ugly underwear and socks that I normally wouldn’t be caught dead in, T-shirts and flip-flops emblazoned with the logo and mascot of a high school I’d never attended, and packs of chips and cookies and cups of Easy Mac. I stood for a long time in front of the cold section, letting the refrigeration fall over me in waves, closing my eyes and soaking it up until my arms were goose bump-y and tight. After I’d bought as much as I could carry, I walked back to the motel, shopping bags looped over my arms, wondering how I was going to lure Ronnie out of bed.

What would Mom want me to do?

If Ronnie and I had been closer, maybe I would know. But Mom had always been the buffer between us, had always been the one trying to bridge a relationship where there really wasn’t one.

“You can call him Dad, you know,” she’d said one night not long after they got married. “He’s technically your dad now.”

“My dad lives in Caster City,” I’d said, my bulbous ten-year-old belly sticking out under the bottom of my shirt.

“That man,” my mom had said, her eyes fiery and narrow, “was never a dad. A dad doesn’t just abandon his child. Ronnie would never be that kind of dad.”

I knew she was right, of course. And it wasn’t like I had any deep connection with my so-called dad in Caster City. Even by the time I was ten, I couldn’t remember what my real father looked like. I didn’t have one single memory of the two of us together. But I always kept Ronnie at a distance anyway. Maybe being abandoned by my real dad was why I’d always kept Ronnie at arm’s distance. How many dads was I going to give the chance to hurt me?

I stood outside the room for a few seconds, key card in hand, while I took a deep, readying breath.

But when I pushed open the door, Ronnie’s unmade bed was empty. The bathroom door was open, the light out—he wasn’t in there, either. Relieved, I shut the door and hustled to the bathroom myself, anxious to put on some clean underwear and then eat a quiet dinner by the TV.

It wasn’t until somewhere around 3 AM, when I woke to find the TV still on and Ronnie’s bed still empty, that I began to wonder where he might have gone.

Ronnie didn’t return until late the next day. I squinted, sitting cross-legged on my bed playing cards, and held my hand up to shield my face from the strip of sunlight that flooded the room when he opened the door.

“Where were you?” I asked.

He let the door close behind him and turned to open the curtains. The heat of the afternoon sun blazed through the window onto my bed.

“You need to get your stuff together,” he said.

I gathered the cards and dropped them into their box. He paused for a second at the foot of my bed, as if he was going to say something, the lines deep in his face and shaded by the several days’ beard he had grown. There were bags under his eyes and he had a smell about him that I recognized as stale alcohol. But he only stared at the bedspread uncomfortably and then moved on toward the bathroom. I heard him unwrap a plastic cup and turn on the faucet.

“Why?” I said. “Where are we going?”

The water ran for a while longer and then he reappeared, the edges of his hair damp as if he’d splashed water on his face.

He let out a sigh. “Listen, Jersey, I don’t know how to say this,” he said, but then he didn’t say any more. He sank down on his bed, sitting with his back to me.

“Say what?” I finally prompted, turning and letting my legs dangle over the edge of the bed. “What’s going on? Is it the funerals? Are they today?”

“I don’t know about the funerals. Stop asking me about the goddamn funerals.” He smacked the bed, a muffled whump. He took another breath, wiped his face. “I can’t… I can’t even think about it,” he said more softly. “I can’t think about anything. The funerals. The house. You. Every day I wake up and there’s all these things to do, and I can’t even get my head around them.”

I wanted to get up and go to him, sit next to him, wrap my arms around him and tell him how much I missed them, too. I knew it was what my mom would want, for me to comfort him and for him to comfort me, for us to be there for each other. But I stayed put, staring at his back, at his hunched shoulders and blackened elbows and the ragged hole in his T-shirt, that same invisible barrier keeping me at a distance.

“We’ve got to have the funerals sometime, though,” I said. “We can’t just let them… rot… in the morgue.”

“I know what needs to be done,” he said. “But it isn’t that easy. I’ve lost everything important to me.”

I slipped my big toe along the bumpy inside of my flip-flop. Almost, I amended for him. I’ve lost almost everything important to me. But I knew he’d said what he meant. He’d lost Mom and Marin—the important things. He was as stuck with me as I was with him.

“I did, too,” I said instead.

He finally turned to face me. “I got hold of your grandparents. Billie and Harold Cameron.”

I frowned in confusion.

“The ones down in Caster City,” he added.

“I know,” I said. “I know who they are.” They were my father’s parents, the only grandparents I had, and Ronnie knew that all too well.

Mom’s parents had disowned her. In all my life, I’d never heard her talk about them unless one of us asked a specific question. But she’d talked about Billie and Harold Cameron. I don’t remember ever seeing them, and I never once got a birthday card or a Christmas gift from them, but I knew who they were in a vague sort of way. I knew that Mom disliked them. She thought they were cold as reptiles, and they’d probably gotten that way by being screwed over by their own kids so many times. I knew that she’d blamed them, in part, for my father leaving us, but that she’d kind of felt sorry for them, too, because all they ever did was clean up their kids’ messes and they never had any enjoyment of their own. She said they seemed depressed and jaded. Like life, and everyone in it, was out to get them.