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Sledziks’ junkyard. Bill says it’s so smashed up you can’t even tell what it used to be. Last night he came home with the chrome deer antlers off the grill, and his hand was all cut up and bloody.”
    “He’s upset,” Shelby interrupts me. “People do strange things when they’re upset.”
    Her eyes stop me from saying more. There are tears shimmering in them again. I realize I’ve said more to her in the past few minutes than I’ve said toeverybody else combined in the past two days. I feel embarrassed until I remind myself that she doesn’t know this.
    “Yeah, I guess so,” I tell her.
    She gives me a final squeeze of her hand and goes inside.
    Bill comes and gets me a few minutes later. Bill in a suit and tie with no ball cap: the sight is so bizarre I can almost convince myself that none of this is really happening, that it’s all a dream, but then he opens his mouth and says my name and I know it’s real because that amount of sadness can’t be made up.
    I follow him inside and sit beside him in the front row. Bill made all the arrangements. He’s been taking care of everything. Last night while I sat with him at his kitchen table poking listlessly at the franks and beans he made for dinner, he told me with a certain amount of shame in his voice that he wished Klint and I could stay and live with him, but he didn’t see any way he could afford to feed two teenage boys.
    Klint wasn’t even there. He was hanging out with Dad’s mangled truck.
    I told him we would’ve liked to live with him, too, that he was almost like a dad to us. He pulled the bill of his cap down lower over his forehead, stared at his beans for a moment, then got up and went and stood at the counter with his back to me.
    For the first time since Dad died, I realized what a loss it was for Bill, too. He and Dad did everything together. They were drinking buddies and fishing buddies. They watched football and NASCAR together and went to all of Klint’s games together. But probably most important of all, they hung out with each other almost every single night after Dad got home from work. The weather didn’t matter. It could be pouring rain or bitter cold or stinking hot, and they’d stand on Bill’s back porch, throwing back a few beers, shooting the shit, and bitching about life in the good-natured way of guys who don’t mind the problems because they know overcoming them gives them something to do.
    The worst part about someone dying is his eternal absence. I’ll never see my dad again. I’ll never talk to him. I’m going to have a big hole in my life now that can’t ever be properly filled by anyone else. Maybe over time I’ll forget the feel and smell and sound of him, the same way I am starting to forget Mom, but I’ll never be able to forget that he should’ve been here.
    All this funeral stuff—people dressing up, bringing casseroles and pies to the house, standing around casting pitying looks at me and Klint, whispering behind our backs—is meaningless to me. It has nothing to do with the realityof Dad’s death. Even the casket sitting ten feet away from me has nothing to do with it. I know Dad’s body is inside it but he’s not. There’s not a man in there, just a corpse.
    We weren’t allowed to see him. I don’t know who made that decision but Bill stood by it. No one’s going to see him again. It’s a closed casket.
    Apparently as Dad’s truck was somersaulting down over the mountain while he was dying instantly, he crashed through the windshield, face first.
    It’s the kind of detail Dad would’ve loved hearing if it had happened to someone else.
    The funeral home director comes over and says a few words to Bill. He’s asking about Klint. I glance around behind me, searching for him, and catch sight of Aunt Jen walking through the doors holding a little girl’s hand. It takes me a second to realize the girl is Krystal. I haven’t seen her for two years, and she’s changed a lot. She’s