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the side, a few adults were gathered around a woman in a black dress dabbing her eyes. You couldn’t miss her, even at dusk—she was tall, with a full, reddish Afro. I guessed it was Juwan’s mom, and the sight of her made his death more real to me than having actually seen the accident. I remember thinking that if I were her, I’d want to kill myself. I couldn’t imagine waking up in the morning knowing Sara was dead and feeling like there was a single worthwhile thing left to do in the world. I went into the kitchen and stood at the fridge, pressing my forehead against the smooth, humming metal, trying to block it all out.
    “Can we go over?” Sara called after me.
    I was relieved to hear Liz telling her no, it was for people who knew him.
    “But Clarice is there.”
    “It’s Clarice’s yard,” Liz said.
    “Can’t we at least open the window?”
    I threw together some bean and cheese burritos, and we ate at the kitchen table, listening in strained silence to what was going on across the street. First they prayed, then they sang. Sara ate half her burrito and asked to be excused so she could go back to the window. She was still there when I finished eating. The crowd had gotten bigger. They were holding candles and singing “Amazing Grace.”
    “Let’s get you ready for bed,” Liz said.
    Sara sighed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all that singing?”
    I scooped her up and started toward the stairs. “It has to end sometime.”
    That night around two o’clock, long after the vigil, Juwan’s mom came back. I was on my way downstairs to the sofa, not wanting to keep Liz up with my tossing and turning, when I happened to look out front. There’s no overnight parking allowed on our street, so it was unusual to see a car at that hour. I figured one of the kids had been too torn up to drive home and had gotten a ride with somebody else. Then I realized there was someone in the car, so I thoughtmaybe one of them had gone out after the vigil and gotten drunk and ended up back here again. Maybe Juwan’s girlfriend. Maybe they’d had a fight—the reason he’d been driving so fast?—and now she was out there wishing she could take back whatever it was she’d said.
    But it was the woman from the vigil who got out of the car. I recognized her silhouette in the gaslight’s glow. It had gotten cold, but she didn’t have a coat, and at first she just stood on the sidewalk, hugging herself. After a while she went over and put one hand on the tree, then the other. She was standing on the flowers but didn’t seem to notice. She looked like she was trying to push the tree over. At some point she began to cry. Her head fell, her shoulders shook, her hands balled into fists against the bark. She was sobbing so hard that I could hear her through the window, gasping and wailing as if she were being mauled, having her heart torn out. Watching her was like standing at the edge of a pit I couldn’t see the bottom of.
    This will sound awful, but I considered calling the police. For her own good, I told myself—she should have been at home with her family. Even if Juwan’s dad wasn’t in the picture, surely she had siblings, parents, someone to look after her. I was about to turn on a light, thinking she might get self-conscious about waking the neighborhood and leave, when she stopped crying and looked across the street, toward our house. I thought she’d seen me. I stepped behind the curtain, but then I realized she was watching a raccoon make its way along the curb. The sight of it must havespooked her, because when it disappeared down a sewer grate, she got into her car and drove off.
    I lay down on the sofa, my heart hammering. I remember feeling like it would serve me right if something terrible happened to my family too. To get what I’d given. That’s what I would have wanted, I think, if I had been in her shoes. Chairman Meow settled onto my chest, and I concentrated on his purring, the ticking of the