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quietly on the bed, her back up against the wall, and there were times when I felt her watching me. Then she lay down to read, and fell asleep. We’d been hanging out but we’d barely touched each other. I’d let my hand brush across her shoulder as I’d moved past her chair in the coffee shop. I’d taken her hand to help her off the bus. Our shoulders had bumped looking up into a night sky.
    Nothing more.
    I thought I heard the blanket get tossed aside, but I was consumed with setting up a footnote. Then she was standing behind me, her presence somehow electric. She slipped her hands around my chest and leaned down and kissed my cheek. I turned so that she could place her lips on mine. Later, under the blanket, before it happened, Cynthia said, “You can’t hurt me.”
    “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I’ll take it slow.”
    “Not that,” she whispered. “If you dump me, if you decide you don’t want to be with me, don’t worry. I can’t be hurt any more than what’s already happened.”
    She would turn out to be wrong about that.

5
    As I got to know her , and as she began to let me into her heart, Cynthia told me more about her family, about Clayton and Patricia and her older brother, Todd, whom she loved and hated, depending on the day.
    Actually, when she’d talk about them, she’d often retract her tenses. “My mother’s name was—my mother’s name is Patricia.” She was at odds with the part of herself that had accepted they were all dead. There were still sparks of hope, like embers in an untended campfire.
    She was a part of the Bigge family. It was, of course, a kind of constant joke, given that their extended family, at least on her father’s side, was pretty much nonexistent. Clayton Bigge’s parents died when he was young; he had no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles to speak of. There were never any family reunions to attend, no disputes between Clayton and Patricia over which family they’d go see at Christmas, although sometimes work kept Clayton out of town during holidays.
    “I’m it,” he liked to say. “The whole family. There are no more.”
    He wasn’t much of a sentimentalist, either. No dusty family albums of previous generations to linger over, no snapshots of the past, no old love letters from former flames for Patricia to throw out when she married him. And back when he was fifteen, a kitchen fire got out of control and burned his family house down. A couple generations of mementos went up in smoke. He was a day-at-a-time kind of guy, living for the moment, not interested in looking back.
    There wasn’t that much family on Patricia’s side, either, but at least there was a history of it. Lots of pictures—in shoeboxes if not in albums—of her own parents and extended family and friends from her childhood. Her father died of polio when she was young, but her mother was still alive when she met Clayton. Thought he was charming, if a bit quiet. He’d talked Patricia into slipping away to get married, so there was no formal wedding, and that didn’t endear him to Patricia’s limited family.
    Her sister, Tess, certainly wasn’t won over. She didn’t think much of the way Clayton’s work took him on the road more than half the time, leaving Patricia to raise her children alone for so many long stretches. But he provided for them, he was decent enough, and his love for Patricia seemed deep and genuine.
    Patricia Bigge had a job in a drugstore in Milford, on North Broad Street, looking out on the town green, just down from the old library, where she would take out classical records from the library’s extensive music collection. She stocked shelves, worked the cash register, helped the pharmacist, but only with the most basic things. She didn’t have the proper training, and knew she should have taken more school, learned some sort of trade, something, but mostly she had to get out there and support herself. Same for her sister, Tess, who worked in