Читать книгу Kara Was Here - William Conescu - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN THE WOMAN ON THE PHONE TOLD BRAD HIS TEST WOULD BE IN THE mobile unit beside the hospital, he thought “mobile” referred to patients who were mobile. He didn’t realize his MRI would take place in a trailer.

“You’re not late. Don’t worry. Come on up.”

Brad had circled the hospital twice before he saw a sign propped up next to the small trailer beside the hospital’s front entrance. At a glance, it looked kind of like a dumpster or storage pod. Inside was a small office and the machine in the next room.

“Is anyone here with you?” the medical technician asked. “Your wife?” The guy was younger than Brad, maybe in his mid-twenties. He wore scrubs but had a baseball cap on the desk.

“No,” Brad said. “I’m here alone.”

“Okay. Well, first I’m going to ask you to take anything you have that’s metal and put it in this tray here: your watch, phone, belt, wedding ring.”

Brad emptied his pockets, took off his ring and watch. “I have a zipper,” he said. “Do I have to take off my pants?”

Oh, that would be fun.

“No, your pants are fine.”

Brad pictured Kara sitting in the office’s single guest chair. She wore a denim skirt, a T-shirt, and leg warmers.

Leg warmers?

Kara shrugged. It’s cold, she said, and she ashed her cigarette on the floor.

She was right. The trailer was strangely cold. It had to be eighty-five outside.

Brad set his belt on the tray and looked back at the chair. He could let himself see her there, or make himself not see her.

She smiled. Which do you prefer?

“The test should take about forty minutes,” the technician said, and he led Brad into the next room, where what looked like a morgue drawer awaited him. “Are you claustrophobic?”

“No,” Brad said. He had taken a Xanax before getting out of the car. He hoped he’d feel it soon.

You know you will, he heard Kara say. You’ve had your share of recreational Xanax.

“I’m going to need you to lie very still. Try not to sneeze or cough. If you need to come out for any reason, just hit this call button, and the microphone will come on. I’ll be right next door.” Brad followed the man’s gaze back to the office beyond the glass partition. He probably saw bad news on that computer screen every day—though he never had to be the one to deliver it.

“It’s going to be loud,” the man added, and he handed Brad a pair of foam earplugs. Brad could only recall wearing earplugs once before, at some awful concert Kara dragged him to. He wedged them into his ears and lay down on his back on the metal tray. The technician inserted an IV in Brad’s left arm. “This is going to feel cold,” he said.

Like the tip of an ice cube running up Brad’s arm.

“Do you want a blanket?”

Brad nodded, and the man arranged Brad’s arms flat against the sides of his body, then slipped the call button into Brad’s right hand and put a blanket over his chest and legs. A moment later, a switch was flipped, and Brad felt himself sliding backward, slow-motion, into the center of the machine.

His eyes circled the putty-colored metal tube. He waited for the Xanax to kick in. An intercom clicked on. “This one will be for six minutes.”

“Okay,” Brad mumbled.

There was a snap, then another, then a loud series of pulses. The sounds came in waves. The first ones weren’t too bad. Others were more insistent, like someone drilling and hammering on the outside of the machine’s metal casing. Collectively, the dissonance would reveal whether or not there was “a mass,” the ophthalmologist had explained. It might also detect if he’d had a stroke—“just a mini-stroke,” the doctor had hastened to add, “one you didn’t even notice.” The word “mini” was not a comfort.

Focus on your breathing, Kara whispered.

He did. He closed his eyes and counted breaths. He tried to ignore the clacks and bumps, the pulsations rearranging themselves again and then again.

Are you starting to feel it?

He was starting to feel it. He let the noise wash over him.

“This one will last for four minutes.”

Another adjustment, then a new set of sounds.

It was odd to lie there, immobile in this tube. While Kara lay in her coffin underground. He wondered how he’d look in a coffin.

Depends on how they dress you. Did you see that shirt they put me in? Where did they find that?

Probably your closet, he said. In his mind.

An abandoned Christmas gift from the eighties, maybe. My God.

Brad concentrated on his breathing. If he opened his eyes and looked toward the entrance, his feet and the technician would start to double in the distance, but inside the tube there was nothing but beige. It was refreshing, in its way, to not worry about seeing.

“This one will be about three minutes.”

Brad closed his eyes. He felt the closeness of his metal cocoon. And he felt Kara’s presence.

It’s kind of sexy, isn’t it? Being in here together.

Brad pictured her pressed on top of him, her chest against his.

He wondered if Xanax was hallucinogenic.

You know it’s not. But it’s cute of you to pretend to forget.

Why are you here? he asked.

She licked his ear.

“Remember not to move,” said the intercom.

Brad focused on his breathing, on the thumping of the machine.

I know you haven’t had sex in two months, she whispered.

The thumping stopped, adjusted itself, then started again.

It’s understandable, she continued. I know it’s been a difficult pregnancy.

It has, Brad told her.

And Val’s been a trooper, a saint.

The machine made a new noise, a whistling from above.

What if I unzip your pants—

No.

We’re going to be here for a while.

“Three minutes.”

If I just rub the tip of your—

No.

Why not? I’m not really here.

I’m married.

Brad tried to distract himself. He counted the clicks and the bumps. He tried to categorize them, but then he lost track.

What difference does it make? You’re just imagining me. Besides, I’m dead. You may be soon, too.

A mini-stroke, the doctor had said. A precaution.

Kara unzipped Brad’s pants beneath the blanket. He could feel her finger run slowly down the shaft of his penis.

“Everything okay in there?”

“Uh-huh,” Brad mumbled.

He could feel the weight of her hand.

“Alright, this one’s going to be a little longer. Eight minutes.”

Brad took a deep breath and focused on the noise. He focused on the gentle pressure of her hand inside his pants. It had stopped moving and now rested there on top of him. It didn’t do anything. Just held him, comforted him. It told him not to worry, through all the clanks and thumps and bumps. It told him there were a million possibilities, that most people who get MRIs are fine, that doctors don’t know what they’re talking about, and that he probably just needed a pair of glasses. The hand held him and told him Val would be okay too, and the baby would be okay, and he would be a good father. The hand stayed there for a long time. The hand told him that he was a good person, a brave person, and that people loved him.

I miss you, he said, or he wanted to say.

I miss you too, she whispered.

BRAD was lying on the couch when Val returned from school. “You’re home early,” she said.

“A little bit,” he said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Fine,” she said. “I picked up a couple movies for you.” She set two DVD boxes on the coffee table. “Something horrible and something horrible-er.” She wrinkled her freckled nose. “For after I’m asleep,” she added.

“Oh, you’re wonderful.”

“Well, you’ve seemed down.”

Brad rose to give her a hug, but Val waved her hand and backed away. “I smell like Listerine, bile, and Febreze. It was one of those days. Let me shower first,” she said, and she went huffing up the stairs.

“Breakfast for dinner?” Brad called behind her.

“I can do that. Give me a few.”

“I can make.”

“Even better,” she called back.

Brad glanced at the coffee table—an action movie and a thriller. He’d seen one of them in the theaters without her, but the other would pass the time. It was sweet of her. She was responding to the funeral the other day, of course. She didn’t know about the MRI that morning.

In the kitchen, Brad opened the fridge and pulled out the eggs and a roll of that gooey croissant dough they liked to pretend wasn’t unhealthy. He preheated the oven and unrolled the dough and carefully folded little croissants on a cookie tray. If it had been any other time in their lives, of course he’d have told her about the test—and she’d have been a great support. But now, when things were so difficult for her, he couldn’t bring himself to burden her with one more worry.

Upstairs the shower clicked on. She was washing away the day, the smells, the sickness. He hadn’t realized how lucky she’d been during the start of the first pregnancy. She was in high spirits every morning, never complained of discomfort. This time around, she had to invent almost daily excuses to leave the classroom. There was a book she’d forgotten in her car, a message to pick up from the principal’s office. She started leaving things in the teacher’s lounge to facilitate these exits: an interesting poem she’d photocopied, papers she’d finished grading, cupcakes because it was Friday.

And it wasn’t just the morning sickness she was hiding. It was the whole thing. They were in week twelve. Last time she’d miscarried during week fifteen, though the doctor said she’d probably lost the baby a week or two before. Once they passed the fifteenth week this time around, he knew everything would be back to normal—better than normal. So much better. But in the meantime, they’d agreed not to tell their parents or celebrate prematurely, and she certainly wasn’t saying anything at school, not after last time. The memory of it haunted every day as the pregnancy inched forward.

Val taught middle school English in Chapel Hill, and everyone there loved her—the kids and parents, the young teachers and the old regime. She created the school’s summer enrichment camp when she was barely out of college, and two summers ago, she walked into the cafeteria one day to find the whole camp throwing her a surprise baby shower. One of the kids started a secret ballot competition: “Guess what Mrs. Mitchell will name her baby.” There were over a hundred entries.

She was at the camp when it happened. She was standing in front of a classroom, thanking a guest speaker, and her water broke. She’d been bleeding off and on, but the doctor had said she was fine. Then in the teacher’s lounge bathroom, before Brad could get there, a wet mass slipped out of her into the toilet. When he arrived, he found her sitting on the floor beside the toilet bowl. She showed him what was inside: It looked like something out of an ultrasound image—little arms and legs—but broken and drowned in a murky pool. They didn’t know what else to do. Eventually, she let him flush.

After that, Val stayed away from the camp during its final weeks. And for months—maybe a year—when she and Brad were out at the mall, the same kids who used to run up to her to say hello and introduce a parent or sibling or friend or pet kept their distance but stared. And Val, who had never avoided a student in public, who loved to wave across the restaurant to a smiling kid with braces, would look down into nothingness. Brad wasn’t certain she even noticed the kids noticing her.

When he and Val started trying again, they decided to time it so she wouldn’t show during the school year and could take the summer off. As it turned out, she got pregnant quickly, so now she was starting to show and had to get creative with her clothes, wearing light sweaters and shawls in late May, long blazers and loose dresses. During class her forehead would bead up with sweat, and she had to reapply antiperspirant at lunch. And as often as they went to the obstetrician, they couldn’t help wondering the next day, would there still be a heartbeat? Was the baby inside her still alive?

Add to this the morning sickness she had to conceal every day at school—and she made light of that part, but he knew it pained her. Every day of it pained her. But soon things would be better. School would let out, and she could stop pretending. She could let her belly hang out, and live in maternity pants, and stop working so hard for once in her life. Week fifteen would pass, and they could let themselves be excited.

Val returned downstairs wearing the terrycloth robe he’d given her for Christmas, her cherry-brown hair pulled back in a clip. He could see in her eyes that she’d be in bed by nine at the latest. “How are we doing?” she asked.

The croissants were in the oven. He’d just cracked the eggs in the pan, sunny-side up. “Good, we’re close.”

“I’m kinda feeling the groove,” she said. “Are you?”

“I can be.”

“Truth be told, I’ve been fantasizing about it all day,” she said. “I’ll go set up.”

Brad smiled to himself. When she bought the PlayStation, she made a valiant effort to pretend it was for him, but she’d gotten it for Trivia Master, a game show–style quiz game they could play online. She’d been a pub trivia fanatic in college, before he knew her. She also attended a Rock-Paper-Scissors competition once—for the camp value, she insisted, though he liked to tell friends she’d put herself through college on the competitive Rock-Paper-Scissors circuit.

“Our nemesis is online,” she called to the kitchen. “Can we start while we eat?”

“Fine, sure.”

“Excellent . . . I now know for a fact that two of my seventh graders play this game. Sarah and Max could be ‘Smartie Pantz 007.’”

Brad carried the plates into the living room. “Isn’t ‘Smartie Pantz 007’ from Akron, Ohio?” Brad checked the screen.

“It’s a front. I said we’re from Atlanta.”

“How exotic.”

Val took a bite of croissant—“Mmm”—and started the game. “My deep dark secret.”

“‘The Twinkie Express,’” Brad said. The name she’d given their team.

Val chose the topic “Word Play,” and the animated host read their first question aloud. “The word ungulate means: (a) to fluctuate, (b) a hoofed mammal, (c) the fleshy lobe in the back of the mouth, or (d) to regurgitate.”

“It’s not C,” Brad said.

“It’s B,” Val said, and she made the selection on the screen.

The host smiled. “You, my friend, are correct.”

Now it was Smartie Pantz 007’s turn.

“How was your showing this morning?” Val asked.

Showing? Brad hadn’t seen a client all day.

But he had left the house early, to go to the hospital—

“Fine,” he told her. “Fine. Nothing special.”

A wave of guilt passed over him. But it was only a precaution, that’s what the doctor had said. In a few days, he’d know it was nothing, and nothing would have been hidden.

Still he did feel a little odd about hiding it. And about imagining Kara there.

“‘Facts and Figures’ or ‘Mysteries of Science’?” Val asked. She was back to the game.

And it really wasn’t a big deal. There was no sense thinking too hard about it. “Mysteries,” Brad said.

“Excellent choice,” the digital host replied.

Margot was still thinking about the voicemail message when she pulled her minivan into the garage. It was a call from Collin, a mess of a guy who’d been Kara’s roommate before they had a falling out and Kara moved in with Mullet. Margot had barely met the guy a couple years ago, but somehow he’d gotten a hold of her number. He was having a get-together next week for Kara’s New York friends to celebrate Kara and what would have been her thirty-fifth birthday.

Hadn’t Margot just gone to a funeral last week? Did she really need to subject herself to this?

Margot deposited the first load of groceries on the kitchen counter, then checked her computer to see if Mike was online. She’d started keeping her laptop on the breakfast table so he could keep her company if he was available. No word yet today. It was three in the morning in Okinawa, but when he was on night shifts he’d often check in before or after, or sometimes he’d text her on a break.

She was lucky, in a way. Women who dated men in the military didn’t always have so much access to them. But she and Mike talked all the time—by instant messenger, text message, even phone or Skype. And he was in Japan, thank God, specializing in communications, which Margot understood to mean he spent a whole lot of time sitting safely in a room staring at a monitor. There were worse places he could be and worse skills he could have. She knew she shouldn’t complain.

But she still worried about him. And although she usually heard from him several times a week, he didn’t actually reveal much about his life. Boring, he always insisted, so no great loss—but it was a loss. When she tried to ask him what he was doing, or if he knew for sure when he’d be able to talk next, or whether he was doing anything dangerous, Mike would often change the subject and start asking about Uncle Bernie. “How’s Bernie doing?” “I heard from Bernie the other day.” “Say, what’s your Uncle Bernie think of the Yankees this year?”

If anyone really was monitoring these conversations, which Mike insisted was possible, they might think Mike had a touching affection for this uncle of Margot’s. But in fact, Bernie didn’t exist. He was an invention Mike used to dodge questions about his work. At first it was funny. (“What do you do all day?” “Not much. Bernie get laid lately?”) She pictured Bernie as the little old man who worked the register at the kosher deli over in Plainview. But sometimes Margot didn’t want to talk about Bernie, or even herself. Sometimes she wanted to know things.

There was one thing she made Mike promise he would tell her—whether he was allowed to or not. If there was ever a threat of his being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he promised to let her know. It wasn’t his plan, he insisted, and there was little chance the Army would send him there from Japan. But Margot worried, so before he left they agreed on a code word: “eggplant.” If he ever mentioned eggplant, that would mean a reassignment was on the horizon. Now Margot couldn’t eat eggplant. She could barely stand seeing it at the grocery store. It didn’t occur to her until after he’d left that she should have chosen a food she already disliked.

Six months, three weeks, and five days until his return. Margot had installed a countdown program on her laptop. A few months after he went away, Mike had promised Margot he was coming back to New York and wouldn’t reenlist. In not too long, “eggplant” would just mean eggplant—maybe she’d even start eating it again. Uncle Bernie would be happily put to rest. She and Mike would finally be conversing in the same time zone, even the same room. It seemed so luxurious—the idea of his being there, in touching distance.

If he were here now, Margot thought, he could help her unload all these groceries—the bricks of cream cheese and bags of brown sugar, the flour and cartons of eggs. If he were here now, while she was loading up the fridge, he might say, “Boy, that does sound like an odd funeral,” or, “Nah, you don’t need to go to another memorial,” or, “Maybe it is time we had a baby.”

Margot had started feeling the maternal tick-tock a few years ago, and moving into this neighborhood hadn’t helped. “More Than Muffins” had taken off while she was temporarily staying with her father, and by the time she’d moved him to a retirement facility and sold his house, she realized she couldn’t afford to move back into an apartment. She was taking in too many orders. She needed to bake cakes and muffins at the same time, have cookies and pies in the works simultaneously. So instead of moving to an apartment in Brooklyn or Queens, she bought a house on Long Island with a large, tax-deductible kitchen where she put in two double ovens, a giant refrigerator, and enough counter space for—well, you could really never have enough counter space.

All the houses in her neighborhood were too big for one person, and most had at least two children inside and parents who looked at Margot with what felt like a mixture of confusion and pity. So sad that the muffin lady is all alone, they all murmured to each other. She’d be so much happier with kids. Maybe someday, they were saying, she really would have more than muffins. Margot could hear them through the walls.

Kara had given her a hard time about the move. You’re finally free to be young again, and you’re giving it up, she’d said. But by the time Margot got her father settled in Florida and bought the house, she already owned an embroidered apron with her company’s name on it. She’d become the fucking muffin lady, there was no denying it. She was a long way from her days as Cougar Cominsky.

She couldn’t believe Brad had called her that.

You do something once, whatever. You do it twice in a row, maybe it’s cute, it’s funny. It’s a coincidence, it’s the craziest thing. But if you sleep with three football players in the weeks before the team hits a sudden winning streak, so help you God, it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life. Not that Margot had been ashamed at the time. She thought it was funny when Reggie or—what was his name?—turned out to be a football player too. Another freshman, no less. When she got back to the dorm the next morning, she woke up Kara and Brad and told them all about it. And it was that weekend—not that any of them normally followed sports—that the team had its first win in a month. Reggie had his picture in the school paper, and somehow, in certain circles, Margot became known as Cougar Cominsky, the football team’s newest mascot and secret weapon.

Badges of pride are different when you’re twenty. Today, Margot was known for her cranberry/white chocolate dessert muffins. At least in certain circles. She needed to make six dozen this afternoon, which was just as well, because she didn’t need to be thinking about football players or Mike or Kara.

What was she going to do about Collin’s memorial thing? The idea of making small talk with Mullet and Collin and Kara’s other druggie friends held no appeal. In fact, to Margot’s knowledge, Kara and Collin had been on non-speaking terms for the past year. Why was he doing this, and how had he gotten Margot’s phone number anyway? Well, Kara did have a tendency to shed her possessions, so maybe she’d left an address book behind. Or maybe Mullet had provided it. Lucky for Margot.

Engaged? Was it possible? Margot still couldn’t make herself believe it.

Mullet had his goddamned Space Invaders video game running half the night. I can still hear the explosions going off in my head.

That was the only thing Kara had said about the man during their last phone conversation two weeks before she died. No reference to feelings for him, the possibility of an engagement.

Could Kara have been hiding the relationship from Margot? But why bother? Could it have come on suddenly? Very suddenly. It seemed hard to believe. And even so, could Kara have become engaged to the man—or to anybody—and not have told Margot?

Margot needed to clear her mind. To busy her mind. And she was familiar with the art of self-distraction. She’d become something of an expert when she was taking care of her parents, and these days it could make her insane when Mike was unexpectedly “out of touch,” as he liked to put it, for a week or more. Or when he jumped. God, she wished he wouldn’t do it, but he earned an extra something per month if he maintained his certification to parachute out of a plane. It was such a tiny amount, in the scheme of things. She wished she could tell him she could replace that income catering an extra bar mitzvah now and then, but she couldn’t say that, and he probably liked it even though he said he didn’t. He hadn’t jumped since before the holidays, thank God, but the times he did, she was up all night baking. Coffee shops across town were forced to try a new walnut/olive scone—“Yes, olive. Humor me,” she’d say—and butternut squash pound cake. She couldn’t sit still until he messaged her that he was all right.

She would never have stayed with Mike if he had decided to enlist while they were together, she’d told Kara. Unfortunately, she happened to meet Mike after it was too late. But she was glad to have met him—who was she kidding?—and he only had six months left. Well, six months, three weeks, and five days.

Margot glanced at her computer screen again—no word from Mike. And no messages on her phone either, except the unanswered one from Collin. So she sighed, picking up the phone, and sent a text message back to him. She’d try to be there, she said. Thanks for the invite.

What else was she going to do on Kara’s birthday? It was going to be a horrible day no matter where she spent it.

Then Margot plugged in the food processor and dropped in the first zucchini. Six dozen muffins. That’s how she needed to spend this morning: mixing the flour and butter and eggs and sugar. And a touch of zucchini in the muffin batter—her secret ingredient. Who would think to mix zucchini with cranberries and white chocolate?

Cougar Cominsky, that’s who.

Neither of them used the word “tumor.” After Brad spent thirty minutes in the waiting room surrounded by children with thick glasses, and ten more sitting alone in the examination room, he was greeted by the neuro-ophthalmologist and informed that the MRI had revealed “no unusual mass.”

“So everything’s okay?”

“Let me start with a few questions,” Dr. Thompson said.

“Have you been in a car accident recently?”

“Do you fatigue easily?”

“Were you cross-eyed as a child?”

“Do you find yourself slurring your speech?”

“Do your eyelids ever droop?”

The answer to each of these and at least a dozen other questions was “No” or “I don’t think so.”

Then the examination began: She shined a flashlight in his face and studied his pupils. She moved her finger around and asked him when it doubled. She held a patch over one of his eyes then snapped it away. She had a nurse come in to take a blood sample for some obscure disorder with a long name. She poked his eyeballs with what looked like a Q-tip attached to a tiny pistol. And she repeated all the tests he’d had at the regular doctor’s office, trying one lens after another. “Is this better, or this? This, or this?”

When she concluded, as the previous doctor had, that Brad had 20/20 vision, Dr. Thompson pulled out a long leather box from a drawer. It looked like the kind of box that might contain a fancy carving knife or antique jewelry, but inside was a row of about twenty foggy glass wedges. She pulled out one of the thinnest wedges, and when she held it in front of Brad’s right eye, the E’s on the chart in the distance came together.

“This is a prism,” the doctor explained. “It bends light, so the image you’re seeing with one eye is shifted horizontally to meet the image you see with the other eye.” She pulled the prism away, and the E’s split again into overlapping images. When she held the prism back over his right eye, the two E’s merged.

“A person with normal vision actually sees two slightly different images from the differing perspectives of the two eyes. The brain fuses these images together into what is perceived as a single, three-dimensional image. What’s happening here is you’re having trouble fusing the separate images on your own.”

The doctor tried a few different-sized wedges to determine how much prism he needed, then concluded that one “diopter” over each eye was sufficient. The prism over the left eye would move the image to the right; the prism over the right eye would move the image a little to the left. Brad would see what was in the middle. He couldn’t suppress a smile.

“Why do you think this happened?” he asked, as she scribbled out a prescription.

“It’s hard to say,” she said. “People are generally born with strabismus—this misalignment of the eyes—and parents notice because a child’s eyes start to cross, or the child gets in the habit of ignoring one eye so it starts to drift. It’s possible you’ve always had a very mild case and your brain was able to compensate for it, but now as you’re getting older, you need a little help.”

So he was always ever-so-slightly cross-eyed but never knew it? That certainly beat the alternative scenario that had sent him into the MRI tube.

Brad left the appointment delighted to feel healthy and unremarkable. One diopter over each eye didn’t seem so bad. A lot of kids had it worse. The largest prism in the box looked like it was an inch thick. How could they even make glasses out of something like that? He dimly recalled a classmate in grade school with crossed eyes and very thick glasses.

Had he ever made fun of someone with a lazy eye? Brad tried to remember and felt penitent just in case.

FIVE days later, Brad picked up his new glasses before heading over to Annie’s Coffee Shop. The shop at the mall advertised lenses in an hour, so he was surprised that they needed so much time. “But sir, these are prisms,” the optician had said, as if the problem were self-evident. Brad had felt himself blush and cut the conversation short.

Now he was wearing his new glasses—wire-rimmed rectangular frames that looked like ones half the people in the world were wearing—and through the lenses, each person, chair, and mug in the coffee shop remained singular. Brad surveyed the room, with its exposed brick walls and framed mirrors, and as pleased as he was to see the world in front of him more clearly, a part of Brad was seeing beyond what was there to what had been there before.

Annie’s Coffee Shop used to be Tyler’s Steakhouse. Then it became a Greek restaurant, then a pool hall, then Annie’s. The whole place had been paneled in dark wood back in Brad’s day; the floor had been clay-colored terrazzo. Near the front window, where Annie’s had a few mismatched loveseats, there’d been a bar where Brad would wait for Kara’s shifts to end. The bathroom in back, he discovered as he passed through its door, looked exactly the same as it had a decade earlier. The walls were painted a bright Carolina blue, the toilets and sink were black ceramic, and the stall door and walls were black too. It was like peeing in a time machine. During the summer that he’d worked as a busboy at the steakhouse, he’d mopped that black-and-white checkered floor too many times to count. Once he’d even slept on it.

He was running a few minutes early and had settled into one of the coffee shop’s wooden chairs when Kara walked in the front door.

No, not Kara. Gwen. Of course it was Gwen. She wore her hair pulled back in a barrette and hanging down below her neck, and though her hair was much straighter than Kara’s, from a distance, she looked like her older sister fresh out of the shower.

Gwen spotted him at once—he gave a quick wave—and she walked toward him with something of a smile. She wore a navy knit shirt with tiny buttons up the front and carried a backpack slung over one shoulder. When she adjusted her own glasses, Brad saw she was wearing the onyx bracelet again, the one he’d given to Kara.

“It’s hot,” Gwen said as she dropped into the chair across from him. Her brow was shiny with perspiration.

“And humid,” Brad said. Kara used to sweat a lot, too.

Gwen ordered an iced tea and was on her second refill by the time the salads arrived. She told Brad all about orientation and its “eye-opening” activities. “I can’t decide if I was more stimulated by the don’t-rape-girls exercise or the don’t-be-a-racist presentation,” she concluded. “But I know I’m a better person now.”

Brad had met Kara during their summer orientation. They were both assigned to the same group during a session in July, along with a pimpled surfer from Los Angeles who had a fake ID and a large quantity of marijuana. Kara and the surfer were sitting together on a bench when Brad walked past. This one seems artsy. I bet he’ll join us. The words were spoken to the surfer but meant to be overheard. Brad stopped and met Kara’s eyes, dark and inviting. They both smiled. That evening, while the rest of their group went on a Carolina-themed scavenger hunt, the three of them sat together in a dorm room and Brad was introduced to what would soon become a fixture in his college life. He did his best to pretend to know what he was doing. Months later, he admitted to Kara he’d never smoked pot before; she said she knew. She confessed the only reason she’d invited him along was to keep the surfer from making the moves on her; Brad said he chose not to believe her.

They didn’t exchange numbers at orientation, but when she said she was sure they’d see each other again soon, he had a feeling they would. It was on the second day of classes. He was sitting in his 8:30 AM film class, and as soon as the lights went out, she appeared beside him. We really should get some breakfast. That was her greeting. Then she tapped his knee, and he followed her out the door. With that, the pattern was set: If the professor was showing a film and both of them happened to make it to class that day, they left as soon as the lights went out. It was only a month before they were having sex.

Gwen had signed up for the first orientation session available, and apparently she hadn’t made any friends in her group, none that she mentioned anyway. She said she’d stayed in her room during the scavenger hunt. That’s when she’d painted her nails shamrock green.

“Did you like the tour?” Brad asked.

“It was a tour. Here’s this building, here’s that one. It was fine, I guess.” Gwen plucked a crouton from her salad bowl, then added, “It was good to get out of Greenwood Park for a few days. Just change life’s window dressing.”

Brad smiled. That phrase—change life’s window dressing. It was so Kara. Was Gwen even conscious of where she’d picked it up?

She was talking now about the art program in New York. It started in a week, right after her graduation. “Mom thinks it’ll be depressing to be up there, but I don’t know what could be more depressing than sitting in the house all summer listening to her and Randy and the two Bobbies.”

“The two Bobbies?”

“The twins: Bobby and Tommy. Did you see them? They look the same, they act the same. I really can’t tell them apart.” Gwen said this with a wave of her hand, a gesture of dismissal with which Brad was familiar. Only if this had been Kara talking, she’d have had a cigarette in her hand, and she’d have ashed behind her, most likely on another person.

“You don’t mean that,” he said.

“I’m sure it’ll be a relief to have me out of the house,” Gwen continued. “Then Mom can focus all of her energy on family number two.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Randy Bunch. It’s a much simpler family. No dead father, no dead Kara, no bad behavior. I’m sure they’ll have a much better summer without me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” Gwen said. “She can’t wait for all this to be done. Once I’m gone and all the crap with Kara is passed, I bet she becomes a Cub Scout mother, really hurls herself into it. They went camping this spring. My mother, who gets manicures like other people go to church.”

Brad wished he could offer her something useful. “People handle grief in different ways,” he managed after a minute. Gwen didn’t respond. She picked through her salad. It wasn’t a comment worthy of a response, Brad knew. Then he asked, “Did you know Kara was engaged?”

Gwen sucked on her straw, and the bottom of the tea bubbled up with the suction. “Mom always said Kara was full of surprises.”

“She never mentioned him?”

“No, she did. A little. But not that they were, like, together. Did you have on glasses at the funeral?” she asked suddenly.

“No, these are brand new,” he said. “What do you think?”

Gwen studied him a moment. “They look pretty good,” she said. “Very Clark Kent.”

“Why thank you,” he said. “I’m still getting used to them.”

“I’ve had mine since I was three.”

“I remember,” he told her, and he gave her a wink.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and they held each other’s stare. “Do you remember that time you and Kara took me out for ice cream in downtown Wilmington?”

Brad nodded vaguely. “Sort of,” he said.

“That’s one of my favorite memories of her,” Gwen said, retiring her fork to the side of her plate. “It was right before Kara left for New York, sort of a good-bye visit. Do you remember how insane the house was? The Bobbies had just been born and at least one of them was always screaming, and my crazy Aunt Nadine had moved in to help out. Y’all were barely there for an hour before Kara was like, let’s go, and you drove me to The Creamery.

“I’d never been there because ice cream always made me sick, but Kara gave me this medicine she said would help. I thought she was making it up, but she said not to worry—if I puked, Mom would blame her, not me. So I got blue bubble gum–flavored ice cream, and it was like the greatest thing I’d ever eaten. And then I didn’t get sick. I thought she was magic. Turned out it was just a lactose supplement—she gave me a whole box of them. But I remember feeling like she’d invented ice cream.”

Brad dimly recalled being exhausted by the whole visit. A noisy lunch. A trip to Walmart. This ice cream run. But he’d been a twenty-four-year-old whose girlfriend was about to move away. Hearing about it now, he was sorry he hadn’t paid more attention to what the visit meant, at least for Gwen. That trip ended up being his last visit to the house, until the funeral.

“Before she left for New York,” Gwen added, “I remember she told me not to think about how far away she was, that I should call anytime I wanted—even after nine o’clock, if I could get away with it.”

“And did you?” Brad asked.

“Yeah, but she usually didn’t answer,” Gwen said with a laugh.

Brad smiled. “That was pretty much my experience, too.”

VAL was in the kitchen when Brad got home. Books and colored folders littered the dining room table. “I’m planning final exams,” Val called out to him. “Sorry for the mess.”

Brad braced himself outside the kitchen doorway. The radio was tuned to NPR, talk of another suicide bombing outside of Baghdad. Then he walked into the kitchen. She had her back to him for a few seconds, then turned around and immediately asked, “What are you wearing?”

He’d decided to be nonchalant about the glasses. “Oh, yeah, these,” he said. “I popped by the eye doctor the other day because I was having a little trouble with distance. Turned out I needed glasses. I picked them up today. What do you think?” He pulled a bottle of wine out of the pantry, then reached around Val to get a glass from a cabinet.

“I didn’t know you were having trouble seeing.”

“It’s a very mild prescription,” he said, his back to her. He uncorked the wine and poured himself a glass. A pot of soup was simmering on the stove. “Chicken noodle?” he asked.

“Vegetable barley,” she replied. She studied him now, her bottom lip pulled in under her teeth.

“Smells good,” he said, and he sipped his wine. “So, do they look okay?”

She was angry. He could tell. But then she relaxed her mouth. It was nice to see one of her again. “They do,” she said. “You know, I could have helped you pick them out.”

“Oh, you’ve got exams to deal with . . .”

“It’s hard to pick out frames alone.”

“Do they look bad?”

“No, I’m just saying. You could’ve asked me.”

“I’m sorry. Next time.”

They stood in silence for a minute. A voice on the radio speculated about Iran’s interest in nuclear weapons, and Val snapped it off. “I don’t have the energy to be frightened about that right now.” Then she met his eyes. “They look fine. They make you look kind of like Clark Kent, actually.”

He chuckled. The moment was passing. “That’s what Gwen said,” he told her.

“Gwen?”

“Kara’s sister. I had lunch with her this afternoon.”

Val turned around and began stirring the soup. The metal spoon scraped against the pot with each rotation. Then she said, “Did I even know Kara had a sister in Chapel Hill?”

“She doesn’t live here yet. She was just visiting for orientation. She’s going to UNC in the fall. She’s done with exams already,” he added.

“Lucky her,” Val said, and she pushed through the kitchen door into the dining room.

Brad wondered if he should follow or leave her alone, but a second later she was back. “Are you doing alright with your—with Kara’s death? I mean, you didn’t say much after the funeral, and now you’re having lunch with her sister.”

“I’m fine, yeah. I was just trying to be nice. She doesn’t have a big sister who can tell her about Chapel Hill anymore, and it was easy enough for me to buy her lunch. I thought I mentioned it this morning.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

Val opened a cabinet and pulled out two bowls and set them out on the counter. “It’s okay,” she said. “I get it. That was a nice thing to do. It must be hard for you.”

“I’m fine, really.”

Val hesitated, then met his eyes. “I would like to not be the fifth person to find out you’ve started wearing glasses, okay? You can ask me to go to LensCrafters with you. You really can. I can handle that.”

Brad tried to wrap his arms around her, but she resisted. Behind her, the soup bubbled over the rim of the pot and sizzled on the stovetop. “Shit,” she said, turning her back to him.

“Let me get that.”

“I can handle it.”

“I know you can, but . . .”

Val shifted the pot to a cold burner. “Just give me a couple of minutes to finish dinner.”

Brad walked out to the dining room and carefully started moving Val’s piles to make space for two placemats.

He didn’t like being dishonest with her. It wasn’t the way their relationship worked. He’d have been glad for the help picking out frames. That could have made it fun. But he didn’t want to have to explain his unusual prescription because that would have required explaining the tumor he didn’t have and the appointments he hadn’t mentioned.

This was temporary, he reminded himself. By the middle of June, they’d be able to talk like a normal couple again. And they had a lot to discuss. Last time, by this point, they’d already stenciled the extra bedroom with circus animals. He’d built the crib and attached a mobile to it, and Val had started looking at fabric for curtains. Almost every meal seemed to revolve around names or day care, or some child development book one of them was reading, or what they’d do if their child wanted to ride a motorcycle. He wanted to have those conversations again. Soon. Only about two more weeks.

Val came out of the kitchen carrying two bowls of soup. “Careful, it’s hot.”

Brad leaned over his bowl to sniff, and his glasses steamed up almost instantly, so he took them off and wiped them on his shirt. Val couldn’t help smiling. “Smells good,” he said again.

“Thanks.”

He followed her back into the kitchen and got silverware for the table, and she began assembling a salad. Maybe later, he thought, in a few weeks, when she was in a better frame of mind, they might sit down to dinner and he might tell her about his little scare.

But then what would be the point, he asked himself, as he lay out the silverware. If a car nearly runs you off the interstate, what sense is there in rushing home to tell your wife about it?

Better to focus on the future. Next time he needed a pair of frames, he’d simply invite her to help him. And if Val asked about the particularities of the prescription, noticed that he wasn’t exactly nearsighted or farsighted, discovered that his doctor wasn’t a typical ophthalmologist—

But why bother thinking that far into the future? By the time he needed another pair of glasses, they’d have a baby on their hands. At that point, the nuances of his glasses prescription would be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Gwen Tinsley stopped outside the doorway of her sister’s old bedroom and looked at the writing on the graffiti wall. All of the names of Kara’s friends were on the wall. And favorite bands. And favorite movie stars. “Pink Ladies” was written in large pink script above the headboard. It dated back to when Kara was in a high school production of Grease. She’d played Frenchie. Gwen wasn’t even born yet.

No one was in the house but Gwen, so she entered the room and pulled back the nightstand. Behind it, scrawled in her own little girl handwriting on the bottom of the graffiti wall, were the words, “Gwen was here.” She’d drawn a smiley face beside her secret message.

Below it was Kara’s reply: “I know, and she better not be here again.”

Gwen opened a drawer of the nightstand and fished out a purple pen. “Now, she’s back,” she wrote. Something about the statement looked lonely, so she added, “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

The house felt quiet.

If she ever saw this wall again, Gwen knew it would be painted over. The whole room would be white. The posters would be gone, the Mardi Gras mask that was thumb-tacked above the closet. Her mother had chosen their trip to the mall yesterday to tell Gwen about the plan to sell the house. As Gwen was packing for New York, her mother said she might want to box up anything personal and throw away anything she’d outgrown. “You never know with these things,” her mother said. “Some houses take a year to sell, and some sell in a day.”

I could give you the name of a good realtor, Gwen was tempted to say.

The boys were getting older, her mother explained. Soon they’d be in junior high, and she and Randy wanted them in a better school district.

“Kara and I went to school at McKimmons. It was good enough for us.”

“You know what I mean,” her mother insisted. “It’s different now. New Hanover County is getting all sorts of attention for its new schools. And besides, it’s time for the boys to have their own rooms.”

Gwen knew what was happening. A part of her wasn’t surprised. “Is this because no one wants to move into Kara’s room?” she asked.

“No,” her mother insisted. “We’ve been talking about this for years. Long before . . .” Dot-dot-dot.

Her mother seldom said anything about Kara’s death that didn’t end with dot-dot-dot. When she told people the news, her mother would say that Kara had died in her sleep, dot-dot-dot. “She was a free spirit,” she might add, dot-dot-dot. Or, “She lived a hard life . . .” Only Randy seemed willing to use the word “drugs.” “You may think grown-ups lay it on thick when we talk about the dangers of drugs, but look what happened to your sister. It was your mother’s worst fear.”

Yes, obviously it was smoking pot that did her in, Gwen wanted to say. But she didn’t.

There had been times during Kara’s rebellious periods—which covered much of Gwen’s life, now that she thought about it—when talking about Kara was unofficially off-limits. Her mother wouldn’t mention Kara, even if she’d just gotten off the phone with her, and would hardly respond if Gwen said something about her. The Bobbies barely knew Kara, the age difference was so great, and Randy didn’t matter. Even when she was alive, Kara sometimes seemed like a ghost, haunting conversations in which her name was never mentioned. Not talking about Kara now felt familiar.

These past three weeks, when Gwen’s mother was on the phone, it was easy for Gwen to tell when the subject involved Kara. Her mother’s answers would be short and breathless and vague. Behind them was an obvious desire to change the subject or end the conversation:

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“When will that be?”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“And that’ll be it?”

That’s what her mother wanted, for that to be it. She was ready to stop talking about it and thinking about it and seeing it. She was ready for the paperwork and phone conversations to stop. She was ready for the sympathy cards to go away; most had been swept off the mantel the week after the funeral, the flowers too. She was ready for Kara’s room to be eviscerated and for Gwen to go to New York and then to college. She was ready for a new house and a new life with Randy and Bobby and Bobby.

Her mother would never open those boxes. Steve had sent two large cartons to the house—COD—and now they sat unopened between Kara’s old bookshelf and their mom’s sewing machine. With a sigh, Gwen walked over and ripped open the first.

The scent was overpowering. Filth and smoke. It was as if Steve had just dumped Kara’s dirty laundry hamper into a box, sprinkled a couple of ashes on top, and sent it to North Carolina. That’s probably what had happened, except Kara had probably ashed all over herself. Gwen got a couple of trash bags from the kitchen and returned to the boxes. The clothes went right into the trash: jeans and shirts and slacks and bras, a coat, a couple of scarves, a black blazer, a furry hat.

Gwen paused when she saw a sleeveless blouse she’d given Kara this past Christmas. That was the last time she’d seen her sister in person. Five months ago, and a little bit. She wasn’t planning to come down for Gwen’s graduation. Her mom was annoyed about that, but Kara had talked to Gwen, and it was no big deal. Gwen was about to be up there for eight weeks, and they could have their own celebration. Gwen held up the shirt. She was thinking about keeping it, but it smelled too much like everything else, so she threw it in the trash.

Below the clothes, which filled most of both cartons, were some books and scripts, which Gwen piled onto Kara’s bookshelf. There was a cell phone in one box, and scattered about the bottom of the other were loose earrings and necklaces and rings. Gwen lay them out on the desk. Most she didn’t recognize beyond their being the kind of thing Kara would wear—silver with something extra, something simple, a twist or a stone. The one thing she was glad to see—and startled to see as well, because it made Kara’s absence from the world more real—was the silver locket that Kara had found at a thrift shop a million years ago. It held a black-and-white photograph of an attractive young stranger. Kara liked to tell people it was her namesake, the late imaginary Great Grandma Kara.

Her great grandmother, Kara would tell people, had been extremely wealthy, but she kept all of her money in cash under a stack of brassieres in her closet, and so naturally in the Great Imaginary Fire, when poor Great Grandma Kara died, all of her money burned up too. Alas, young Kara was not to be a rich girl. Kara told the story to boys when she was in high school, to anyone in town who admired the locket when they were out, to Gwen’s junior prom date, whom Kara knew Gwen didn’t particularly like, and to every employer who required a death in the family as justification for a missed shift.

Gwen slipped Great Grandma Kara into her pocket. It felt like stealing, even though she knew she could take anything she wanted now. Should, in fact. She’d already taken a few bracelets from Kara’s dresser. The rest of the jewelry she didn’t want to throw away, so Gwen pulled open Kara’s top desk drawer to sweep it all in, but when she did, she noticed in the back a finger puppet that had belonged to her. Gwen pulled out the puppet and fished under the rim of the desk into the back of the drawer and found a kazoo that had also been hers, and a lip gloss she’d loved as a child and had forbidden Kara to use. Gwen sifted through the contents that had been tucked in back. “What a bitch,” she laughed. There were at least another half-dozen stupid things that belonged to her.

Gwen went to her room and brought back a carton she’d been using to pack her own things. In it, she dumped the entire contents of Kara’s desk drawer, along with the jewelry that Steve had sent back. She surveyed the room and pulled off the shelf a couple of photo albums that were spilling over with high school and college photos. A picture of Kara with Brad fell out, and Gwen studied it. They were probably nineteen in the picture. Brad had no glasses and longer, messier hair. He was skinny and unshaven and handsome. Somewhere on the graffiti wall Kara had once written the words Mrs. Bradley Mitchell. Gwen scanned the wall and found the words near the dollhouse in the corner. They’d been scratched out in pencil, though they were still perfectly legible, the capital M, B, and M fat and oversized.

For the next two hours, Gwen sorted through Kara’s drawers, closet, and bookshelf, filling up boxes and labeling them “Gwen’s Closet.” She didn’t want anyone to throw away the Grease 2 poster, but she also didn’t want to be the one to take it down, so on the white wall, beside the poster, she wrote “Save for Gwen” in pencil.

It was dark outside when she finished, and she could hear that the Bobbies and her mother were back in the house, though no one had come to find her or to make her go to dinner. She’d packed the locket, the cell phone, the photo of Kara with Brad, and the bag of pot from the dollhouse in her luggage for New York. She would be there in four days.

As she was heading for the kitchen, she took one more look into her sister’s room. Beyond the giant treadmill, the graffiti wall dominated the room. There was little evidence of Gwen’s packing, and Steve’s cartons were now gone. Gwen wondered what would feel worse, coming back to find the house sold or standing in this doorway and seeing all signs of Kara erased.

“Happy Birthday,” Gwen whispered to the room. “I’ll miss you.”

Margot had driven many times to the Park Slope apartment Kara had shared with Collin, and to the one she’d shared with Mullet, and to other apartments that had preceded them. She had not, Margot now realized, seen the inside of Mullet’s apartment, but that might have been true of one of the early apartments, too. Kara went through a lot of roommates when she first moved to New York.

But for all her moving, she’d always lived in Brooklyn. Margot had lived in Queens for a time, then moved back to Long Island. If she and Kara met in the city, for drinks or a show or a shopping trip, they usually took trains in and trains home. But when Kara voyaged to Long Island, which had become the most common way they visited, Margot would drive her home the next morning.

“Boring Girl’s Night Out,” that’s what they liked to call it. Margot was the boring girl—that was implied, but never said—but it was more fun being boring with Kara. They’d go to Target, rent a movie, make dinner—well, Margot would make the dinner, and Kara would keep the wine poured. Then they’d get up and have breakfast. Margot might cook, or they’d go out. Sometimes they dyed the grey strands out of their hair; sometimes they painted their nails. Then Margot would drive Kara back to Brooklyn with her haul of groceries and a box of muffins.

Kara would usually wait for the drive home to bring up anything bad that was going on. She’d been fired. She was getting back into coke. She’d been to a party and blacked out. These drives back to Brooklyn often felt like confession. Margot would say it was bad, and Kara would agree, and she’d swear she was never going to do whatever it was she needed to never do again, and—Oh, I forgot to tell you the most hilarious story—and then the subject was changed. Maybe Margot should have worried more about Kara during these conversations. But Kara always made it sound like she had things under control. She seemed naughty, yet indestructible—just like she’d been in college. Even her DUI a few months ago she’d managed to explain away somehow. There were the customary pangs of regret on the Belt Parkway, but those felt a bit manufactured, for Margot’s benefit or perhaps more for Kara’s own sense of ritual cleansing. That’s how they generally felt. Maybe there was more to it, sometimes. Maybe Margot should’ve listened more carefully.

Today she was listening to the radio, or at least she’d flipped on the radio to fill the silence beside her. Several times she considered turning around and heading home. She didn’t know Kara’s other New York friends. Why did she need to meet them now?

The apartment building was red brick and five stories tall, and as she approached it, Margot saw an empty lot just beyond it and the early signs of construction. That was different. Margot remembered when there had been a taller building there, abandoned, condemned. It had been gated off, a couple of windows broken, and Margot imagined Kara imagining what took place inside. We’re right next to the empty building that’s clearly a safe house for giant rodents, Kara would tell the car service operator. I’m one building down from the gang headquarters near the corner, she’d tell the Chinese food deliveryman. Okay, if I don’t get killed by the arms dealers living in the bombed-out building next door, I’ll meet you right outside.

Margot rang the bell for 4C, was buzzed in without any conversation, and walked up the stairs to what was for four years Kara’s home. When Margot knocked on the door, a twenty-something-year-old Asian girl with long hair and a nose ring opened the door but didn’t particularly acknowledge Margot’s presence. Margot walked inside and hovered around a table, which held bowls of pretzels and chips. Mullet and Collin were nowhere to be seen. An earnest, whiny rock ballad played from a pair of speakers attached to an iPhone.

There were about ten people in the small living room and at least as many bottles of wine and liquor gathered on the kitchen counter. Everyone was young and waifish, except for a thickly built man on the sofa who had a white goatee and was saying, “Girl, don’t make me slap you back to Kansas,” to a man wearing eyeliner. Margot had more hip and thigh and breast than the six girls here put together. Not that anyone seemed to notice her. One girl registered her presence briefly; another said “Hi” and “Excuse me” and grabbed a handful of Pringles. This didn’t look like a funeral. It looked like a party.

It was strange being back in this space without Kara. The dusty floral sofa was the same, the found-on-the-curb coffee table with one leg duct-taped in place. Against one wall was a bookshelf that had once held a framed snapshot of the two of them at a wine-tasting. The poster from Grey Gardens was Kara’s. The lamp in the corner they’d bought together.

“Are you Margot?” someone asked after what was probably a good five minutes.

“Mm-hmm.”

“So great to finally meet you,” the girl said. “I didn’t see you come in. I’m Pepper.”

The girl’s tone of voice seemed to imply that Margot should know who she was, so Margot nodded. “You too,” she said, and they shook hands.

“I worked at the restaurant with Kara,” Pepper said. “And we went to auditions together sometimes.” Pepper had spiraling red hair pulled back in a bandana. She looked like she was about twenty-five, and there was no question she’d played Annie in a high school production, talent or none. “Let me get Collin,” she added, and she turned around and shouted his name.

That seemed to do the trick. He emerged from a bedroom, opened his arms, and hugged Margot as if they’d met more than once in their lives. He was wearing a spicy cologne, and his hair dipped below his eyes so he had to toss it back when he stepped away from her.

“I’m so glad you could come,” he said. “I really am. I just felt like I had to do something. Did you go to North Carolina for the funeral? You did? I couldn’t, and I just felt awful about the way Kara and I left things, so Pepper said do something, don’t keep moping for God’s sake, and I thought, with Kara’s birthday coming up and most of us not being able to go to the funeral, that this is what Kara would’ve wanted, you know? A party. So anyway, thank you for coming. Make yourself at home—did you get a drink?”

Margot let Collin make her a madras, but he put barely any orange juice or cranberry in it. It tasted like colorful vodka, so she had to sip it down and add more juice herself a minute later. Cougar Cominsky would have been mortified.

She had heard about the falling out; she just hadn’t heard the details. Somehow, quite suddenly, Collin was an asshole, Collin was full of himself, Collin was intolerable, and Kara was moving out. That was the end of Collin.

Before he’d disappeared from Kara’s life, Collin was often the character in Kara’s stories who dragged her to the next bar at three in the morning, or had a friend who could get them more Valium, or was going through a phase of bringing home Puerto Rican men, or got them into an after-party at some stranger’s apartment somewhere in Brooklyn Heights. So when Margot heard that Kara was moving out, although she was predisposed to feel some sympathy for the people who lived with Kara, Margot didn’t mind knowing that Collin was out of Kara’s life.

“Come sit down,” he said, leading Margot and Pepper to the sofa. “Everyone, this is Margot, one of Kara’s friends from back in college.”

A chorus of Hi, Margots followed, reminding Margot of those AA meetings, or at least their sitcom facsimiles. “Hi, everyone,” she said. She sipped her madras.

“I’m jealous that you knew Kara in college,” Pepper said. “What was she like?”

“Oh, a lot like the Kara she is today—or was. Full of energy and jokes. Everybody loved her.”

“Even the people she hated,” said the man with the white goatee, and most of them chuckled. There was something to that, Margot thought. In college, Kara made everyone laugh; the whole drama department loved her. But in private, she wasn’t always a fan of her fellow actors, and she was quite unforgiving of stage managers.

“Kara used to say the nicest things about you,” Collin said. “She had pictures of you two looking young and precious. Oh, and there was some story about you doing a photo shoot at a shopping mall. Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Margot said. “We didn’t actually do the shoot, but we did schedule it. We went to one of those photography studios for toddlers and babies, and she told the salesman that ‘Mummy and Daddy’ didn’t have any pictures of us from our childhood, so we wanted to put together a childhood photo album now. She was very convincing—”

“Of course,” Collin said.

“She told the guy we wanted to do a dozen shots dressed as children—riding hobby horses, posing as angels . . .”

We don’t actually have adult-sized angel wings, the salesman had told them.

No problem. We have our own, Kara had replied. Now can we do the bath time shot in the back? Obviously, we don’t mind being naked in front of a photographer, but it could be awkward doing it in the store window.

Margot snorted a laugh. “It got a little outrageous.”

“Oh my gosh,” said the man with the white goatee, clapping his hands. “Did Kara tell you about that time at Riccardo’s?”

“No one but Kara could have gotten away with that,” Pepper said.

“What?” Margot asked.

“She and I were walking past Riccardo’s—Do you know it? Big, posh place in Soho—and I’m ogling the window, and I say I always wanted to go there but it’s too expensive. So, girl hands me her purse and says, ‘Wait here.’ Next thing I know she’s in the restaurant, standing beside this table where they just got their meals. And she says to this stuffy-looking couple she’s terribly sorry but there was a problem in the kitchen and they need to remake their dinners, but they’ll have replacements out in no time and it’ll be on the house. One minute later, girlfriend is out the door walking beside me with two plated dinners in her hands. I mean, it couldn’t have happened faster. I almost peed on myself. We ate on a stoop around the corner. She’d even grabbed two napkin rolls from the host stand—I still have the silverware. It was the best dinner I ever had.”

Collin told them about an afternoon he and Kara had spent loudly shopping for matching Rolexes for everyone in the extended family. “Everyone,” Kara would clarify, “except Cousin Gertrude . . . that bitch.” Pepper recalled Kara’s three lively days of employment at Victoria’s Secret. Then Collin remembered the Great Grandma Kara routine and how Kara had used it to get free drinks at the bars and as an excuse for forgetting someone’s order at the restaurant. “She was using that story in college,” Margot said, “to get out of exams.”

Margot was nursing her drink and keeping an eye on her watch, and at about the one-hour mark, she figured it would be reasonable to say her good-byes. But Mullet still wasn’t there, and she was curious. “Has Steve been by?” she asked in a general way.

“Who?” Collin asked.

“Steve.”

“Who’s Steve?”

The guy with the white goatee clapped his hands together. “Is that the yummy guitar player?”

“No, that’s Toby,” Pepper said.

“Steve’s the old guy Kara was crashing with,” said the Asian girl with the nose ring. “The dude with the mullet.”

“Oh . . .”

“Speaking of her guitar player,” Collin said, “has anyone told him?”

There were some shaking heads. “I thought you were going to invite him to this,” said the nose ring.

“I wouldn’t recognize him in a lineup of one,” Collin said. “I only heard about him through Pepper.”

“I don’t know him either,” said the guy with the goatee. “But I waited on him once . . . and had inappropriate thoughts about him later.”

“He hasn’t been by the restaurant in a while,” Pepper said. “I think Kara said he was going on tour with some band.”

“Fancy,” someone said.

“We should all keep an eye out for him,” Pepper added, in a serious tone.

“That’s going to be a fun conversation,” mumbled the man with the eyeliner. “‘Can I take your drink order, and by the way . . .’”

“Who is this?” Margot asked.

“Toby,” Collin said.

“A guy Kara was seeing a little bit,” Pepper added.

“Recently?” Margot asked.

Pepper nodded. “A couple of months, maybe. It wasn’t serious, but I mean, someone should tell him, right? I wish I knew the name of his band. Did Kara ever mention him to you?”

“No,” Margot said. “This is definitely the first I’ve heard of him.”