Some things you remember, and some you forget. Of the things you remember, you have to wonder what’s real and what’s translated into a memory from a story you heard. Like in this memory, my dad is wearing Bermuda shorts. I don’t think I knew what Bermuda shorts were back then, so how would I know that? Except I remember it.

It’s early that last morning, and I’m sitting on the stoop outside the front door in my yellow pajamas. Mom is cradling a green duffel bag to her torso. Icy tears stream down her face like rain on a windshield, except there are no wipers to sweep them away. Mom is melting, and moms are not supposed to melt. Dad is I don’t know where, but wearing Bermuda shorts. I know something irreversibly terrible is happening. The earth is shifting below my feet, and there’s a rumbling earthquake like when the subway comes into the Seventy-Ninth Street station, shaking the entire platform. It rattles my entire body, rearranging my insides, changing my chemistry. But that part of the memory can’t belong in Billings at all, because I’d never been on a subway then, so that means it’s not quite true.

I am holding a red die. Not sure why I’m holding it, or where it came from, but I remember the feeling of its dull corners pressing against my tiny fingers. I remember thinking that if I hold on to the die a bit longer, a bit harder, an all-loving God will make this earthquake stop, will stop the flood of icy eye water that is turning my powerful mom into a puddle. God like the one Grandma Phyllis believes in. The one she says prayers to.

Dad walks out in his red Bermuda shorts, no shirt, smoking a cigarette. It’s like watching a movie now, because I am not there. Mom and Dad, on a screen, yelling at each other, way too loud for how close they are standing. Mom with tears streaming down, turning my stomach inside out. I remember watching and thinking, No. Let’s stop. Like I’m asking God. Like I’m asking my parents. I don’t know if I say this or I think this. I have no idea.

And the answer to my words or prayers is that my mom grabs my left arm and pulls. Her hand wets my arm, makes it feel slippery. She says, “C’mon, honey,” and I am dragged away. I scream. I scream to my dad. I scream to the universe. Stop this from happening. The world is ending! The world is ending! Stop this!

I drop the die. I never get to see how it lands, if it stays on the stoop or falls to the ground. And no one stops the world from ending.

So no, I’m not gonna just sit here and be like, God is listening.

Not so much, in my experience.

YOU HAVE NOT lived until you’ve sat in a rickety old chair outside a trailer at night in north-central Wyoming. This is just crazy beautiful, with so many stars glimmering above me that I feel like if I believed in anything more than the Porcupine of Truth, I’d be praying to it right about now, saying, Thank you Jebus, you amazing son of a bitch. It’s just un-fucking-believably gorgeous.

I’m half depressed as shit, half in awe of the world. I’m sitting like a fool in a trailer park and I don’t know why. I guess I’m chasing a mystery about my dad, who doesn’t give a crap about me, and his dad, who doesn’t know I’m alive. But my dad is dying. Dying. It scares me for my life. How random is it all gonna be? How do you meet a Laurelei, or a straight Aisha? And even if you do, how do you not let them annoy the crap out of you, or disappoint you to death? What’s the point of it all?

The door creaks open and Laurelei ambles out, wrapped in a puffy pink blanket. Even though I’m wearing baggy gray sweatpants Thomas lent me and it’s July, it is chilly, and my teeth are chattering. She sees me sitting there uncovered, and she goes back inside and comes back out with the blue-and-white quilt that I left on my couch. I wrap it around myself, and she grabs a second lawn chair and drags it over to me. The sound cuts into the otherwise silent Wyoming night.

“Do you know that your grandfather did the same thing you’re doing?”

“Huh,” I say.

I hear her smile in her voice. “He couldn’t sleep. Grabbed himself a blanket and sat in a chair in just about the same spot you’re sitting in. Came and looked at the stars, and he cried like a baby.”

I smile, though it’s hard for me to imagine my grandfather crying like a baby. “That’s cool. Sad, but cool.”

“He was a good man.”

I don’t know if I believe her, but it’s nice for her to say. We sit quietly and look at the sky.

“Goddamn,” I say, and Laurelei laughs.

“Isn’t it perfect?”

“Yeah. Sorry about the ‘goddamn’ thing. I know you probably aren’t big on using God’s name in vain or whatever.”

She flicks me lightly across the back of the head. When I look at her, she says, “God fuck damn shit.”

I laugh, and she laughs.

“Don’t idealize me,” she says. “I’m a human fool. We all are, and it took me a long time to become the happy person I am today. A long time. Okay?”

I look back at the stars, and so does she.

“So do you believe in God?” I ask.

“I do.”

“But you’re not Christian.”

She sits up abruptly. “Surely you’re aware that not everyone who believes in God is a Christian, right?”

“Well, yeah,” I say, though in fact I have temporarily forgotten that, like, a majority of the world isn’t Christian. How did I forget? Thomas and Laurelei meditate. They’re probably Buddhists. How stupid am I?

“So you stopped believing in Christ and started believing in what?”

“It’s hard to explain,” she says. “I would say that I’m more spiritual than religious at this point.”

“What does that even mean?” I stare upward at the gleaming stars.

“To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality.”

I laugh. “It’s all cheap stuff made in China?”

“Exactly.” She flicks me in the back of the head again. “Exactly what I meant. I mean it’s prepackaged. Lowest common denominator. People just have to follow the preset motions and rituals and rules. They don’t have to think about how the words reconcile with their own hearts. Their own experience.”

“Huh,” I say, considering that. “And what do you believe in now?”

She raises her hands to the sky, then puts them behind her head. “Everything.”

I snort. “Weak sauce.”

She laughs. “You don’t believe.”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I just have trouble believing in things that don’t exist.”

“What doesn’t exist? The stars? The sky?”

“God,” I say. “God is a concept used by people who want to feel better about the pointlessness of being alive. You live, you die. The end. Sorry, but that’s what’s real.”

“For you,” she says, as if to add it to the end of my sentence.

“Hey, call it what you want. That’s what I know to be true.”

“So can I teach you something I’ve learned?”

I look over at Laurelei, who is beautiful in a mom way, who I would be okay spending the rest of my life listening to, even if she’s batshit crazy. “Go for it. Knock yourself out.”

“I’ve learned that the answer to every question about God is ‘Yes.’ ”

“What if it isn’t a yes or no question?”

“So judgmental for such an otherwise delightful young man. I’m saying that whatever it is that a person believes about God is totally, completely, irrevocably true — but only if you add two words.”

“Check, please?”

That one earns me another playful smack, and then she stands up and says, “I think I’ll head back to sleep. You?”

I nod and stand up too. “So you didn’t tell me what the two words are,” I say.

She opens the screen door and holds it open for me to walk through, and then she follows me. I see Aisha’s sleeping cheek illuminated by the starlight.