“I’ll go with you,” I say to Bill.

  * * *

  It’s a relief to step outside and feel the wind, see the birds flying in panicked circles above the house. They seem to know that something is coming. They must already see the storm from so high above, the dark web spun from the equator, coming just for them.

  Bill drives the truck.

  The truck, I must say, is a little dirty everywhere, except for the cup holder where he keeps a bottle of Perrier.

  “What?” he asks, when he sees me looking at it.

  “You drink Perrier,” I say.

  “Of course,” he says. “It’s the best water there is.”

  There are always too many things to say to Billy, and it’s impossible to say them all at once, and so it’s like there is nothing to say, except the basics, of course, what any person might say to any other person while driving in a car, like hello, and how are you? And how strangely formal for a man who once watched me undress in the dark. Hello and how are you, man who once had his cock inside of me. But this is not a thing to say—not to Bill, who drinks Perrier and has a gray streak crawling up his sideburns.

  “How are you?” I say.

  This is what it’s like to be a grown-up. This is what it’s like to drive to the grocery store with Bill.

  “I’m okay,” Bill says.

  Bill is always okay. Not good. Not great. As if he has decided that he is never allowed to be good.

  “It’s okay if you’re good,” I say. “It’s okay if you’re dating Lisa. I know.”

  “I’m dating Lisa,” Bill says. “Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “I mean, it’s not official or anything,” Bill says. “She won’t admit it, but I think she’s a little embarrassed by me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I grow plants for a living. And Lisa’s a neurosurgeon.”

  “She’s a neurosurgeon?”

  “For animals,” he adds. “But still. She’s ambitious. She wants more.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Who knows?” he says. “Who knows what Lisa wants?”

  We turn onto Main Street. So many years ago, here we were, standing on the side of the road, calling your name. Looking at your dead body. And now we are on our way to get wood. To get lobster. And Lisa is a neurosurgeon for animals? What happened to her swim career? And why isn’t Billy a friar?

  “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t taking your final vows?” I ask.

  “I didn’t know when I last saw you,” he says.

  When he saw me in the parking lot of the liquor store, he had planned to return to the seminary. Right after his father’s funeral. He had planned to go back and take his vows and spend his life in a quiet silence. But then he saw me at the store. Then I told him I was taking off for London, and he felt this feeling.

  “It was a quick feeling,” he said. “Just this feeling of, Oh, I want to go with her.”

  The whole car ride home, he kept thinking, I want to go to London with Sally. But that’s ridiculous, so he settled on asking me out for a drink.

  “But you never even did that,” I said.

  “I tried,” he says. “I called you. A week after I saw you, I called. But you never picked up.”

  “I was already in Europe then. I didn’t have a phone.”

  “Right,” he says.

  “So why didn’t you go through with it, though?” I ask. “Why didn’t you take your final vows?”

  “They say you should question,” he says. “But I was always questioning. I was never certain. I thought at some point, the certainty would just come. At some point, I would give myself over to it enough that I would feel some kind of permanent peace. I would feel truly forgiven. But I never did.”

  That’s when Billy realized—he shouldn’t join the seminary to be forgiven. He shouldn’t be there out of guilt. Others were there because they were believers. Because they wanted to serve God. But Billy realized he wasn’t there to serve God. When he was away from the seminary, he did not miss God.

  “I missed you,” he said. “I kept thinking about those nights we used to spend at the beach.”

  So he stayed longer and longer in Aldan. He kept visiting the beach. He kept delaying his return.

  “I told myself I was just staying longer to get my father’s estate settled,” he said. “I told myself I was staying so I could sell the store.”

  It was true, in a way. At first, nobody was buying. And then, suddenly, after the recession, people were buying, but the offers didn’t seem high enough to Billy. He rejected them all and kept waiting for something better and passed the time by tending to the plants inside the store. He couldn’t bring himself to let the plants die. His own father had sown and raised most of these plants, and suddenly, Billy wanted to understand why. Billy wanted access to his father’s brain in a way he never cared about before.

  “That’s what happens when parents die,” he says. “All of a sudden, you want an answer to every question you never thought to ask them.”

  He read through all of his father’s old notebooks. He started researching at night and running experiments with the plants during the day. He started growing seeds indoors during the long winter. He invested in a new lighting system, a new irrigation system.

  “I found it much more healing, to be honest, to take care of my father’s plants,” he says. “Funny, because I always resisted it so much as a kid. I thought it was embarrassing that my father was a florist. Like there was something gay about working with flowers.”

  “High school boys think everything is gay.”

  “High school boys are the worst.”

  “I’ll agree with that.”

  “I remember being proud when he broke his neck at the store,” Billy admitted. “I remember telling everyone about it. Like, Look how manly my dad is, everybody! Look how dangerous it is to take care of flowers! But then I started actually working with them.”

  “High school boys?”

  He laughs.

  “No. The plants.”

  When the spring came and the ivy crawled back up his father’s walls and the tulips returned from the dead, he knew he was never going back to the seminary. He knew that he had cared for something—truly and deeply—and he saw how those things came alive again. He had been so convinced that the only solution was to run away—to give up his home, his life, his body—to say, God, do what you will.

  “But it wasn’t,” he said.

  The solution was always the opposite of what we expected it to be. The solution was to stay here, to plant a rosebush in the middle of Main Street. To wait, to have patience, to watch new life grow up all around him. And now, it’s been years. Now, our town depends on Billy. Our town comes to him for help. They ask him to line the walls of the church for their weddings. They ask him to cover the graves of their dead. They have forgiven him.

  “So,” he says. “What have you been up to?”

  * * *

  It’s strange, shopping with Billy. After all this time, here we are, pushing a cart together in the store, putting food in it, as though we are married. At Home Depot, he gets the wood and the brackets. I get the batteries, the candles.

  At the grocery store, I say, “I’ll get the lobsters. You get the hand grenades.”

  “Because I’m a man?” he says.

  “No,” I say. “Because I don’t know what to look for in a hand grenade. Never bought one before.”

  “You never bought an avocado?” Billy asks. He sounds upset on my behalf. “Who are you?”

  So we shop together.

  “You want it to be soft, but not too soft,” he says. “Check for rotten spots.”

  Then we stand by the lobsters. There is nobody at the counter. We are waiting for the fish boy to come out of the dark hole that leads to the back. He is likely on break, on his phone, wasting his life away. He is probably not expecting anyone to buy lobsters from him on a day like this, hours before a hurricane.

  We stand in line. Behind us, there is a man and his little girl. The little girl keeps staring at us. She has the face of a girl who is on her way to a funeral. She reminds me of you. Or maybe me. She starts confessing things with surprising intimacy, a quality I’ve always liked, but something I like more and more in a person as I get older.

  “Did you know I’ve never had a lobster before?” the girl says.

  We did not know this, we say.

  The teenage boy finally emerges from the dark hole.

  “Oh,” the boy says. “I didn’t know you guys were here,” like he knows us.

  The boy asks me how many I’d like, even though it is quite obvious by his tone and facial expression that he doesn’t give a shit how many I want. He seems to hate us, simply because I want lobster. Fair enough. I have hated people for less. His hatred is the only power he has.

  “Six, please,” I say. “Steamed.”

  “You want them steamed?” the boy asks. “Like, here?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  I don’t like steaming lobster in the house. I hate the way it smells, as soon as they die. It’s instantaneous, and you can smell the death in the house all week.

  The boy mumbles something under his breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I ask. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” the boy says. “I’m talking to the lobsters.”

  The boy puts the lobsters on a baking sheet and says he will be back in a certain number of minutes that nobody can discern, and then turns with the lobsters into the dark hole.

  Billy raises his eyebrows, and I know this look well. It means: Some people are just fucked up. A truth learned from spending too much time at the mall in high school. Bill smiles at me. I want to smile back. I want to laugh about how much the boy hates us. I wonder if the boy has a girlfriend, if they watch movies and make out together in their parents’ basements, if they drink beers and make up games with their hands and ignore each other’s acne and talk about the shit songs on the radio the way I once did with boys. I wonder what it means to be young now and I have no idea. Who is this boy, and what exactly is he saying to the lobsters?

  Billy is so close to me and the desire is strong, a giant wave pulling me out to sea always, but I won’t. I won’t stand there, with your boyfriend, and act like he is mine. As if the joke is ours. A joke is nothing to own; it is not a house or a family or a small white dog. It’s just a wave crashing over my toes, weakest just after it’s strongest, gone as soon as I feel it.

  “I’m going to get the big one,” the little girl says.

  She is done scouting. She returns from the lobster tank with enthusiasm, wanting permission. She points to a large red lobster, alone on the right side of the tank. “The Queen,” she calls it, but the Queen doesn’t look so much like a queen. She looks big, but in a bad way, like her growth is a thing she cannot help. It is a punishment, being too big for your own house. Being two inches taller than your older sister. And it’s true—I am.

  “You want to eat the Queen?” Bill asks the little girl. “What, are you trying to start a revolution?”

  He is talking to the girl like she’s an adult. Like she understands what he understands. I can never decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing, to talk to children as if they are not children, but I admire it.

  The boy comes back with the lobsters.

  “Here you go,” he says.

  * * *

  We drive back with the lobsters in silence. We pull up to our yard.

  “Why didn’t you call me again?” I ask.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” he says.

  “Bother me? I loved you.”

  “I know. And I felt like I had ruined your life enough,” he says. “I caused you enough pain.”

  “Well,” I say. “That was certainly true.”

  * * *

  Outside, Billy builds the ladder up the tree trunk. I help him. I hold the nails while he hammers the wood into the tree, plank by plank by plank, until it’s a ladder all the way up to the top. He climbs up it, and then chainsaws off branch by branch. Each one lands with a loud smack, and I cringe each time, as if the world is ending.

  “I don’t like this,” Mom says. Mom comes out to watch with a cocktail and a floppy hat. “I can’t watch. I just can’t watch.”

  But then she watches.

  “He’ll be fine,” I say.

  “This is so dangerous,” Mom says. “I can’t believe your father was going to do this on his own.”

  Dad is curious. Nervous, too. He can’t help himself—he is a safety consultant to the very core, and when a man climbs up a ladder, he can’t help but imagine the fall.

  “You okay up there?” Dad asks.

  “I’m good!” Billy shouts.

  “This is too much for me,” Mom says, and goes inside and settles herself with another cocktail and the weather. I do some work on my computer. But all I can think about is how weird it is that Billy is outside, cutting down our maple trees, and Dad is standing at the base, worried about him, and you are a storm on TV.

  Rick, the weatherman, sounds confident in his predictions of your behavior. He is confident that you are a system like all systems, that can be measured using instruments. He is clearly excited about the storm, about the beginning of hurricane season, I can see it in his posture. Weathermen all over the shore are finally called to action; they are given wind pants and windbreakers and wait along the shoreline, the first front.

  It’s amazing, how they can track you. They have colored your path red, from the Caribbean to North Carolina to Virginia to Baltimore to New York City and beyond. On-screen, you look like an angry thing. You have something to say. You are a red circle, in Maryland, where you have already killed three people.

  “Now I understand that the decision to take a hurricane seriously is a personal one,” the weatherman says.

  He says he knows how it can divide a town into people who take things seriously and the people who don’t. Some residents have been badly burned before; some people have stockpiled flare guns and water and canned beans and the storm passed before they knew it even came. Sometimes the danger turned out not to be danger at all; sometimes the wind chimes barely chimed, and it was embarrassing, all of that silence. Embarrassing to be standing around the kitchen with those jugs of water, the windows boarded. Embarrassing to have drilled holes into your wall, thinking something significant was on the horizon, only to find out that it was just an ordinary day and you spent it drilling holes into your wall.

  “But make no mistake. Old and disabled people should do their best to leave the state, to travel to relatives, to make a holiday of it,” he says.

  “I think you’re supposed to say ‘elderly,’ Rick,” I say.

  I’m sure someone will yell at Rick for this. He also keeps forgetting to use an “or” instead of an “and” so that being old sounds like being disabled and vice versa.

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Mom says. “Did I tell you that his wife left him?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Mom looks at the ocean on TV, which is flooded with surfers on their boards, waiting patiently, like you are something to have faith in. I feel I might scream. All of a sudden, I can’t stand it here for one more second, the smallness of our house, the constancy of the waves, the inevitability of disaster. I can’t stand how even now, after all these years, I sometimes look down the hall and expect to still see you, coming out of our bedroom, brushing your teeth, toothpaste building like sea foam.

  Because you never are. You are dead—I know you are dead. I saw it with my own eyes. I read about it in the autopsy report, over and over again, and now I know too much about your death. Fun facts that are not very fun, things you do not even know about yourself, like that your brain weighed 1,360 grams. Three times what your heart weighed. And your aorta, it was smooth and glistening. Teeth, hemorrhagic. A laceration on your left eyebrow. Cuts on your lower lip and chin area. Rigor mortis present in the upper and lower extremities. A contusion on the chest, and a broken right ankle, which somehow seemed beside the point.

  And yet, I used to sit up at night, saying your name, waiting for you to appear before me, waiting for you to turn into Kathy again. Waiting for you to say something. Just one little thing. A simple “hello” would have sufficed.

  But it was only silence that followed. And this silence made me feel so stupid. Your silence, it has always been the most perfect punishment.

  * * *

  It gets dark before Billy can finish. He comes into the kitchen, exhausted from his work. Bits of wood sticking to his sweat.

  “Why don’t you stay for dinner, Billy,” Mom says.

  “Mom,” I say. “He was just here to work.”

  “Oh,” Billy says. “Sure. That’d be really nice. I love lobster.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Mom asks.

  “You want a beer?” Dad asks him.

  Has Dad forgiven Billy? Or does Dad just like giving beer to hardworking men? It’s something I’ve seen him do with the plumber and the gas guy. And I have no idea what kind of beer Bill likes. Or maybe he likes whiskey? Maybe he’s the kind of man who likes a smoky scotch? I dated a lot of those men in my early twenties.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Bill says.

  He sits in our chair. He cracks open the beer. Spreads his legs a bit. The posture is youthful, and he looks like he did a thousand years ago, when he really was your boyfriend, sitting at our kitchen table, madly in love with you. Trying to impress our parents. Talking about basketball with Dad. Complimenting our mother on the potato salad. Telling stories about his dead grandmother.