So I said, “Kathy?” Just once, into the darkness. It was all I could bear. “Are you there?”

  Of course, you weren’t there. You were over in the cemetery where we had buried you. Why did I keep forgetting this? I stood on your bed, and I took your name off the ceiling, ripped off each star one by one, and stripped some of the paint. But I didn’t care. At a certain point that summer, I just couldn’t look at your name anymore.

  At the end of July, Mom and I finally had to leave the house. We had a dentist appointment, which surprised me the same way it surprised me to see Dad putting on a tie to go to work a few weeks after you died.

  Grief doesn’t pay the bills, a thing he literally said as he looked into the mirror.

  Our lives were over and yet we still had to do things like go to the dentist. We had put this cleaning off long enough, Mom said. And Mom needed a mouth guard to wear at night. She had been grinding her teeth lately, and her back tooth was starting to crack.

  On our way to the dentist, Mom stopped for gas. She handed me the money and said, “Sally, would you be a dear?” and so I went inside to give the guy cash and that’s when I saw him.

  Your boyfriend was standing by the fridge, looking at the sodas with some girl I had never seen before. He and the girl stood there for a long time, because the girl couldn’t decide on a soda. Your boyfriend was like, “What do you want?” and the girl kept saying, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  The girl was torn. The girl was wearing Sketchers. The girl had a thousand bracelets on. The girl was experiencing a major problem, she said: she really liked orange soda, and she also liked grape, and Sprite was what she drank just before dance competitions, but Coke was good, too. Coke had its place in the world. Sunday mornings, that’s when she always snuck a Coke with her brother.

  “Hmmm, this is hard,” she said again, and at this point, I almost yelled at her, the way Dad always yelled at us when we couldn’t decide what ice cream flavor we wanted. Just choose! Dad said. This isn’t a strategic military decision. This is ice cream, girls. And we laughed, because Dad was right. It was just ice cream. And Dad was never really angry. Dad was like the Dad in sitcoms who only got angry for laughs.

  Well, I didn’t yell at the girl, of course. That would have been weird. That would have been what Lydia the therapist called acting on an impulse. I just stood there and consoled myself with the fact that she had terrible hair, nothing at all like yours. And I’m not just saying that because you’re my sister or because you’re dead now. It was a fact. Determined by the end-of-the-year poll. Kathy Holt: Best Hair, it said in the yearbook. Priscilla showed us, and it was nice, Mom said. Very nice. Even though you were dead, your classmates still voted for you. What good classmates. They must have really loved your hair.

  But this girl’s hair, it was not the best. It was no waterfall. It was brown and short and ugly. It sat just above her shoulders like mine used to. It was so hair-sprayed that it hardly even moved as she leaned on her right leg, then her left leg, and then her right leg again. And it was so ridiculous how long it was taking her that I will now present it to you as a one-act play:

  YOUR BOYFRIEND AND THE GIRL BUYING SODA: A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS

  The girl: I don’t know why this decision is so hard for me.

  Your boyfriend: Maybe we should consult an expert.

  Your boyfriend: Or maybe you can blindfold me and I’ll just stick out my hand and let the random hand of fate decide for us?

  The girl: Good idea. I love the random hand of fate.

  The girl blindfolded your boyfriend with her hands. She spun him around three times. Then your boyfriend stuck out his random hand and grabbed two sodas, and the girl laughed really hard until she realized what he chose.

  The girl: Oh. Root beer. I don’t actually like root beer.

  Your boyfriend: That’s fate, I guess. Can’t fight fate.

  And isn’t that weird that at some point, your boyfriend was driving you toward your death, toward a tree, and we were all screaming, and we were all bloody, but now he was here, at the mini-mart, with some girl who was not you, unable to decide on a soda? And you would never drink a soda again, I realized. You were dead, buried in a field under a hundred roses, and your boyfriend was here, in the mini-mart, with another girl, surrounded by soda. By opportunity. And I could just tell by looking at them, the way they leaned into each other on the way to the cash register, that they were going to go drink their root beers and have sex somewhere. Probably in your boyfriend’s car. Probably on the beach somewhere.

  I could tell that kind of thing about people now. And not just because I had watched a lot of Jillian Williams that summer. I was fourteen now—not that I allowed anybody to celebrate my birthday this year. But even so, I felt older. Wiser. I had aged a thousand years overnight, Mom liked to say. That’s what death does to a person. Death destroys people, splits them open. Reveals who we really are inside, and it’s not a pretty sight. It’s quite bloody, actually. And your teeth—

  I’m not supposed to think about your teeth. Lydia the therapist told me not to dwell on things like that. She said it was not productive. But sometimes, I thought about your teeth. Sometimes, the sight of your bloody teeth returned to me when I least expected it, like there, in the brightly lit chip aisle of the mini-mart where your boyfriend said, “Oh hey, Sally,” like I was nobody. Like he was running into a teacher from school or his mother’s friend. And so I was like, “Oh, hey, Billy.”

  As if I didn’t see him until that moment.

  As if he did not have a giant scar running all the way down his cheek.

  As if his ass were not on his face.

  That’s what I wanted to tell the girl. Did you know that his ass is on his face? But that was not a thing to say. And so we just stood there, as if all the conversation in the world had dried up like a beach just before a tidal wave. All of the beautiful words, sucked out to sea.

  “Well, see you later,” he said.

  He left with the sodas. The door dinged, and I looked around the store, as if you might materialize, as if your love for your boyfriend was so strong it could bring you back from the dead, and I half expected it to.

  But you didn’t appear. And Billy walked to his car with some other girl. I was left standing alone in the mini-mart, and the guy behind the register was like, “Um, can I help you?”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t. You really can’t.”

  I threw up all over the floor. The guy behind the register wasn’t even mad. He just sighed. Like this was always his fate. Like his life was a bad movie and he had seen the vomit coming from the very first scene. No matter what he did, he could never keep this gas station clean.

  I offered to help, but he just said, No, please, like it’d be better if I just left. I paid for the gas, and some gum to get the bad taste out of my mouth. And then one of those waffles wrapped in plastic. Your favorite.

  * * *

  Back in the car, Mom was annoyed. “What took you so long?” she asked.

  I didn’t dare tell Mom about throwing up or seeing your boyfriend. Both things would have upset her, and I didn’t want to upset Mom. At the moment, Mom wasn’t upset. And these were precious moments, when Mom was listening to the radio, putting on her lipstick, opening up her checkbook, or making a sandwich. It would only be a matter of seconds before she started up the car and began crying again.

  “There was a line,” I said.

  “Were you talking to Billy in the store?” Mom said. “I saw Billy come out of the store.”

  “No,” I said. “We didn’t talk.”

  “He looks better,” Mom said, and she did not sound pleased about this. Mom looked like this might make her cry. And maybe she would. Mom could cry while doing just about anything. She was a champion weeper. I don’t know who gives out awards for this kind of thing, but Mom could win awards. I have seen her weep while vacuuming. I have seen her sob while standing in front of the microwave waiting for peas to defrost. I have seen her break down in the mailman’s arms. She even cried once while eating ice cream at Sunny Daes. We had gone on your birthday, because we didn’t know what else to do after Priscilla left—it felt wrong to celebrate, wrong not to celebrate—so Dad said, “How about ice cream?” as if we could replace you with an ice-cream cone, as if Mom were a child, and I’ll admit that sometimes when Mom cried, she looked like our little cousin when he wanted candy, and she said, Okay, sure, in this tiny soft voice. But then she just stared at the cone and said, “Kathy used to love ice cream,” and I wanted to say, “Everybody loves ice cream,” but I just watched the cream drip down her hand.

  That was how Mom was staring at the waffle in my hands. I opened it up, tried to eat it before it could have any effect on her, but it was no use.

  “Kathy used to love those waffles,” Mom said, and then she got so teary-eyed, I felt angry.

  “It’s just a waffle! Everybody likes these waffles,” I said. “That’s why they keep them up front by the register. It’s not a specific thing to Kathy.”

  Mom looked at me.

  “Sally, don’t be like that,” she said.

  I tried not to be like that, whatever that was. I just finished the waffle while we listened to the music on the radio, which was a sad song about children getting older. Mom was always listening to sad shit like this. Gone were the days of driving through town while listening to the Beach Boys or Ace of Base or whatever song it was that you were currently obsessed with. Now, it was just:

  MOM AND ME AND THE CAR: ANOTHER DRAMA IN TWO ACTS

  Me: Why do you listen to such sad songs?

  Mom: They’re not sad, Sally. They’re beautiful.

  But they sounded pretty sad to me. I turned the radio off, before the song could fill up our car and destroy us. Not that silence was much better. Silence made my gum chewing very loud.

  Mom: I really wish you wouldn’t chew gum just before the dentist.

  Me: This gum is actually recommended by dentists.

  Silence again. But not even that helped, because the silence made me wish you were here. It made me want to tell you how I saw Billy flirting with the girl in the mini-mart, even though I know it would have made you jealous. Jealousy turned you mean. Jealousy turned you against me sometimes, on perfectly fun car rides to Grandma’s house—Why does Sally get the front seat? I’m the older one, shouldn’t I get the front seat? Jealousy made you talk shit about your very own best friend, Priscilla, when she went to faraway places on holidays with her family and sent you postcards—a perfectly nice thing for a friend to do—but you thought it was sinister. “I don’t get the point of postcards,” you said to me, throwing Pricilla’s cards into the trash. “They basically exist just to be like, Ha ha! I am in Europe and you are not.”

  We were never in Europe. Always in Watch Hill, and that one time, Amish Country, which we loved. We had no complaints in Amish Country.

  Remember how much we loved Amish Country?

  “I wish I could be Amish,” I told you, after we toured an Amish house.

  “Me, too,” you said.

  I was fascinated that the Amish were allowed to drink Coke, and you were more interested in the coffin on display in the other room. I remember you saying, Sally, check it out, and we checked it out. A simple thing. Not a big box like the ones on TV. The corners were cut, to save space in the ground, to be economical, practical, and the insides were lined in white. Everybody gets the same coffin, the tour guide said, so nobody has to worry about what kind to choose, and we thought this was silly. How hard could it be to pick out a coffin? I asked you on the way out.

  But this was actually a problem for Mom and Dad. There were so many different kinds. Some were even on sale, which upset Dad. Dad was like, Who would do that? Who would buy their daughter a casket on sale? And Mom was like, Richard, these kinds of things get very pricey. And then they stared at the coffins again. It was a surprisingly difficult decision, it felt like picking out a home for you forever. It was picking out a home for you forever.

  This was what I mean about getting older. Once, I stood in front of a hundred coffins, and Dad said, “What do you think, Sally?” and I had no idea what made one coffin better than another, so I pointed to the shiniest one and said, “I like that coffin,” and Mom got upset, because apparently we weren’t supposed to say “coffin.” It was “casket.” Caskets were for people. Coffins were for vampires.

  But whatever. How was I supposed to know that? Mom was always getting mad at me, about weird things now. For example: Why did I buy a sugary waffle just before we went to see the dentist? Mom didn’t understand. Didn’t that defeat the point of going to the dentist?

  Me: I bought the waffle because we’re on our way to the dentist.

  Mom: You’re acting like this is your last meal.

  Me: Maybe it is.

  It was supposed to be a joke but didn’t feel like one because Mom started crying. There was only Mom now, Mom and her tears and her blinker, keeping time, as we turned onto Main Street. We passed the spot where you died, and Mom started crying so hard, she had to pull over. Right up next to the tree and the memorial of teddy bears and crucifixes. Not like you were very religious. But now it was like, poof! Kathy is dead! Fold your hands and pray for the repose of her soul.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Mom said. “Amen.”

  Mom said a little prayer every time we passed the spot, which was nearly every day, because it was Main Street, and we had to drive on Main Street to get anywhere in our town, so we were always driving by the spot, always praying to the Lord.

  By the time the prayer was over, Mom was weeping hard. Mom bent over the seat, put her hand against the steering wheel, and started howling, like her guts were being shoveled out of her, and I knew that was how death was supposed to make a person feel, like your insides were on your outsides.

  But I just sat there.

  “Yep. This is where it happened,” I eventually said. It felt like I was in class, looking at slides of some sacred and historic site that meant nothing to me. Like Mr. Klein was pointing at the houses ancient people used to live in.

  This is where the people slept.

  This is where the people went to the bathroom.

  This is where they ate. Just imagine.

  But I couldn’t.

  “Mom,” I said. “We’re going to be late for the dentist.”

  “I’m sorry, Sally,” Mom said, wiping her tears. “I’m really sorry you have to see your mother like this.”

  I nodded. I was sorry, too. But I knew it wasn’t her fault. I knew nothing was worse than a mother’s grief, because that’s what people kept reminding me, even Mom herself, late at night when she couldn’t sleep. Nothing is worse than a mother’s grief, Sally, she said into her tea (Mom drank a lot of tea now), and I nodded. I agreed. It sounded profound. True. But then she said it again on the way to the bank and again on the way to the dentist, and I started to become skeptical. These are the kinds of statements teachers were always warning us about using in our papers, bold declarations that include words like never, or always, or since the beginning of time. Mrs. Framer said, be very suspicious of these kinds of sentences, because there are always exceptions. “Nothing is always true,” Mrs. Framer said. “Which is exactly the kind of sentence I’m talking about!”

  “Actually,” I said. “There are more terrible things than a mother’s grief.”

  “Oh?” Mom asked.

  I told her about all the people who were drawn and quartered throughout history. Their bodies were ripped at the seams and then dragged through town on horses. Not to mention, the millions of people who died from the plague. And the Romans!

  “What about the Romans?” Mom asked.

  “They used to wipe their butts with shit sticks.”

  “I don’t know what a shit stick is,” Mom said. “But I don’t like the sound of it.”

  “It’s a communal stick the Romans kept in the bathhouses,” I said. “Everybody used the same one. Can you even imagine?”

  Mom couldn’t imagine.

  “You mean to tell me that everybody in the ancient world had to wipe their butts with the same stick?”

  “Imagine everybody in Aldan sharing the same toilet paper.”

  “Sally,” Mom said. “Stop it.”

  But I could see her begin to smile, which meant she was about to laugh in that crazy way she always laughed just after she cried. I didn’t care if it was somewhat crazy. I loved Mom’s laugh. I would say anything to hear it (though it was true about the shit stick).

  “Well, thank God for modern plumbing,” Mom said.

  Mom dabbed at her eyes. Turned the car back on. No matter how upset Mom was, no matter how many of her children she buried, she would not be late to the dentist. That was just rude.

  “Okay,” Mom said. “Off we go.”

  * * *

  “Five hundred dollars?” Mom said, when the dentist told her how much the mouth guard would cost. “Are there any other alternatives?”

  “Well,” he said. “You could relax.”

  This was a joke, but Mom was humorless again. “Not possible,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Let me think it over. You go first, Sally.”

  The dentist stocked the room with all of his watercolor artwork. In his paintings, green and red people were always sitting on a white rooftop drinking coffee or wine, which was even more sad, because his office was in the middle of the strip mall, right between the One Hop Pleasure Stop and the painting store Where Art and Animals Come Together.