Mom and Beth are reminiscing over wine in the living room and Mom has been wasted for as long as she’s been talking and laughing, so that’s a couple of hours.

It’s creepy, hearing her laugh. I’m so used to her silence.

I spend most of the evening avoiding them and looking for the sympathy cards that flooded the mail the first two weeks after Dad died. I have to search the whole house. I can’t ask Mom where they are because I don’t want asking her to be the difference between her being a happy drunk and a sad one, even though I’d rather she not be drunk at all.

I eventually find the cards strewn haphazardly in the very back of the junk drawer in the kitchen. I gather them up. They’re still in the envelopes they came in because at some point, we have to send thank-you cards back, I think. Thank you for your sympathy. I set them in a neat pile on the table and find the envelope with Culler’s name and address near the bottom of it. His card is white watercolor paper, folded in half. It’s completely blank on the front.

I think I love it.

I think I love the idea that my dad’s death could be so far beyond any cheap sentiment you could put on the front of a sympathy card. I hope Culler meant it that way.

I open it up.

He is missed.

Culler Evans

I stare at the card for a long time, tracing over the letters with my finger. That’s how I think it should be. Everything is complicated now but this is simple and true: he is missed. I want to go into the sympathy card business. I want all the cards to be like that. Forget sappy messages about overcoming; I want ones that say NOW YOU’LL BE A LESSER PERSON THAN YOU WERE or WE CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND or I CAN UNDERSTAND BECAUSE SOMEONE I KNOW DIED TOO or maybe something about how grief can make your skin feel sore and bruised and electric because that’s how my skin has felt ever since, except for my hands.

Mom cackles from the living room. I hear the clink of glass against the table and then she’s slurring, “Oh no! No! Oh—God, get a paper towel, Beth!”

And then a knock on the front door.

I hastily put the cards back into the junk drawer.

“Someone’s at the door,” I call into the living room. Nobody says anything and the knocking persists. “I said someone’s at the door. Maybe one of you should get it.”

“We’re busy.” Beth. “So get it yourself please. And if it’s anyone for your mother, tell them she can’t talk right now.”

“I can talk just fine, thank you very much,” Mom insists, dissolving into giggles. “Do you want me to recite the alphabet?”

I close my eyes and count to ten.

Whoever is outside is still knocking.

Go away.

My cell chimes in my pocket. I answer it.

“Open the door already.” Milo. “I’m not moving until you do.”

I kind of thought so. I hang up and open the front door. He’s there. At first, I cross my arms like I’m mad at him, but I don’t think I am. I mean, I kind of am, but I don’t know. I step onto the porch and close the door behind me.

“What?” he asks. “I’m not allowed inside now?”

“You don’t want to go in there. Trust me.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Yeah.”

He sits on the steps and I sit beside him. Neither of us says anything for a minute and then he exhales slowly and rubs his hands together.

“Wish you’d stuck around today,” he says. “Missy didn’t stay that long.”

“I was kind of caught off guard.”

“So you’re mad because I didn’t tell you, right? That’s what this is about?”

“How long did you know? Was it really May?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. I nudge him in the ribs. “Come on, how long did you know she was coming?”

“I knew at the end of May.”

“My dad wasn’t dead then.”

“Yeah, but you got weird with me when I was with Missy—”

“I did not—”

“Yes,” he interrupts, “you did. I never saw you. You just hightailed it every single time she was around and we barely talked, we barely saw each other for—”

“Ten months,” I finish.

“Exactly.”

“Milo, she was your girlfriend,” I say. “You should have been seeing her more than me. I mean, come on—you see it in movies all the time, where the girlfriend gets this hate-on for the best friend and then the guy has to choose—”

“What? Where did you get that fucking ridiculous idea? What makes you think Missy would’ve actually made me choose between the two of you?”

“Her name.”

He snorts. “Nice.”

“Seriously—Missy?”

“Melissa.”

“She tells people to call her Missy.”

“So? You have a boy’s name.”

“And you have a dog’s name.”

It’s humid out. Too humid. I debate telling Milo about Culler, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll just wait, like he waited to tell me about her.

That seems fair.

“So are you two back together while she’s here or what?”

“We’re just going to hang out for the summer,” he says.

I think that means yes.

“You still could’ve told me sooner.”

Silence. I hate this silence. I can’t even stand it enough to appreciate the summer sounds all around us, and those sounds are one of my favorite things about this season. How gentle the breeze is, that soft rush. The way it moves the leaves on the trees. The crickets. The birds that haven’t called it a day, not yet.

“Missy doesn’t have a problem with you,” Milo says. “You don’t need to disappear.”

I don’t say anything. He nudges me until I look at him—three times—and when I look at him he seems so sincere and nice about it, it kind of makes me want to cry.

“Just don’t,” he says. “Okay?”

“My hands are still cold,” I say stupidly. I don’t know why. It’s all I can think of to say and it’s the one thing that never stops being true. I wish I knew how to make them warm again.

“Stop,” Milo says. He shifts away from me a little and asks, “So where did you go? I mean, after you left.”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere,” he repeats.

He’s not buying it, but he leaves it at that. He rests his head on my shoulder. I lean into him. His hair is soft and smells like an unlikely combination of coconut and mint and I want to ask him what kind of shampoo he uses, but I know if I did, he’d just accuse me of sniffing his hair.

And then Beth totally ruins the moment by pushing through the door and gracelessly making her way down the steps to face us. Her cheeks are pink.

“Eddie,” she says. “Can I talk to you for a minute? In private?”

“No,” I say. Beth, half-smashed, wanting to talk to me privately. So many possibilities and none of them I am willing to subject myself to. “No way.”

“Please,” she says.

That should be my first real clue that something’s not right because Beth never says please to me and means it, but I realize this too late.

“If you have something to say, say it.”

“Fine. I need help getting your mother to bed. She’s…” She pauses for a long moment, and then forces the next word out of her mouth slowly. “Incapacitated.”

I stare. “How much wine did you give her?”

“Why does that matter?” she asks. “That’s unimportant. It’s moot now. I just need help getting her to bed. So will you help me or not?”

“Do it yourself.”

“I can’t.”

“Then why did you ask?”

Milo gets up. “I can help—”

“No!” I don’t mean it to come out that way—that strangled, that urgent. They both look at me like I have three heads. My face burns. “… I don’t want you to.”

“Look, I’ll do it,” Milo says. “Eddie, it’s not a big deal.”

“Milo—”

He goes into the house before I can stop him. Beth fixes me with a haughty look.

“Maybe next time you’ll listen to me when I ask to talk to you privately.”

“What do you mean next time?”

I step inside the house. Beth follows. When I get to the living room, it’s a nightmare. Two bottles of wine have been decimated. Milo hovers over my mom and she smiles at him, out of it, trying to get her arm around his shoulder.

It takes forever.

I watch them walk unsteadily across the floor, reaching the stairs at a snail’s pace. My stomach shrivels into nothing. I don’t want to see this.

“There’s a step,” Milo tells her in his most gentle voice. I bury my face in my hands. I don’t want to hear it either. “That’s great, Robyn. Okay, there’s another step … great…”

“It didn’t have to be this bad,” Beth says after Milo and Mom finally disappear. I raise my head and glare at her. “You don’t have to turn everything into a big scene. And look on the bright side: wine has lots of health benefits.”

“Thanks so much, Beth. Really.”

“Oh, relax. I haven’t seen your mom that animated in forever.”

“You got her drunk.”

Beth shrugs. “Still. When was the last time you made her laugh?”

Ten minutes pass before Milo comes back down.

I can’t even look at him.

“Thank you, Milo,” Beth says pointedly. She pats him on the shoulder and fumbles past him. She smiles at the wine bottles. “That was fun. Like being back in college.”

“You’re not that young anymore,” I tell her. “Every day you’re farther from it.”

She stops dead in her tracks and faces me very slowly.

I brace myself.

“Maybe you could clean this up, Eddie, if it’s not too beyond you.”

Her voice is cool, but it’s all she says.

“It really wasn’t a big deal,” Milo assures me after she’s gone. He walks over to the table and grabs one of the wine bottles. He holds it out to me.

“Still some left.” He takes a swig and makes a face. “That is the most fucked-up wine I have ever tasted.”

I grab the bottle from him. “It’s not like you’re an expert.”

“I guess not.”

He grabs the glasses and takes them into the kitchen. After a second, the water rushes—he’s washing them—and I’m struck by how adult this all is and how tired that makes me. I should be wrecked. I should be upstairs, sleeping it off while Mom and Beth act like grown-ups down here. Instead, I just stand still, staring down the wine bottle until Milo comes back into the room and touches my shoulder. When I look at him I see that night—the one that changed everything—all over his face.

That night is the reason for this one.

“Did he seem unhappy to you?” I ask, clumsily turning the bottle over. I almost drop it. My stupid hands. “I mean … did he seem like he wanted to die?”

Milo takes the bottle from my hands. I can tell he doesn’t like touching them. He thinks about it for a second and I imagine him searching through memories on memories for some sort of clue. Something he saw—something he saw that I didn’t.

“He seemed like he always did,” he finally says.

Which is a horrible answer the more I think about it.