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the apartment door. His father—our father—lived with my mother by then. The day Genevieve died, my mother was busy giving birth. “But don’t feel bad, Elaine,” Nate said to me. “You almost died, too. You were early.”
    It seemed obvious to us that Genevieve’s death was a lot better than our father’s. It was definitely faster and there were no hospitals or operations, and Genevieve didn’t have to lose her hair or spend a lot of time throwing up into stainless steel bowls. My mother agreed with us on principle, she said, catching our eyes in the rear-view mirror, but either way
it wasn’t appropriate to make a sport out of it. “Death isn’t a contest, you know. Everyone gets the same prize.” She lifted one hand from the steering wheel to make the point as we drove through the cemetery gates. Genevieve and our father were in different sections, but my mother said it was still very convenient for visiting, even if the traffic in this part of the city was hell.
    We remembered our father a little, Nate more than me because he was older. Our mother encouraged us to ask all the questions we wanted, which helped us make up a few more memories. No topic was off-limits when it came to our dead parents. My mother didn’t want us to grow up feeling guilty or resentful about things we didn’t understand. “Fear is the source of all disease,” she said as she made our kale breakfast shakes. She wasn’t sure what our father had been afraid of, and we knew the theory didn’t apply as well to Genevieve, but Nate and I bought into it anyway. We had a lot of questions.
    â€œDid he walk with a cane?” Nate asked.
    â€œYes,” our mother said, scraping the clogged blades of the Cuisinart with a wooden spoon. “He tried, anyway. He didn’t want a ramp out front. We’d already spent a lot of money on the landscaping.”
    â€œWhat colour were his glasses?”
    â€œHe didn’t wear glasses, Nate. You know that.”
    â€œAnd what about his eyelashes?” I asked. I felt left out because I mostly remembered a shadow that smelled like Vicks VapoRub. “Did they fall out in clumps?” Nate said that our father had pink eye a lot and sometimes wore sunglasses to watch television.
    â€œThis blender.”

    The more questions we asked, the more my mother’s face went strange. The bones in her jaw looked like they had softened and stretched. It was uncomfortable to watch her when she talked like that. I felt like we were scaring her, which was the worst thing you could do to a person, in my book. Nate was going on about radiation therapy and its scientific connections to superpowers, and my mother’s face kept shifting, like I was looking at her underwater. She rested the spoon on the stovetop and rolled up the sleeve of her dressy black sweater to pick at the blades, and Nate kept firing question after question: Was our dad ever a Cub Scout? Did he drink kale shakes? Which one of the three of us did he love most?
    Nate had once told me that mothers, as much as you might love them, were all the same. He said that if anything happened to my mother, another lady would adopt the two of us, maybe one of our aunts in Philadelphia or Newark. Women loved babies most, he said, but we were still little enough to be okay. “It’s fathers who are the tough ones. Much harder to come by.”
    Nate was living proof. I heard the way my mother tucked him into the bunk above me, telling him to close his eyes, sleepy bird, and dream of flying over all the green places on the Earth, but he still had to play the Father-Son Scout Baseball Tournament with Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander did up all the buttons on his polo shirts and parted his hair down the middle. At Halloween he gave out toothbrushes. He said Nate could call him Captain as a kind of nickname, but Nate stuck to Mr. Crisander. Mr. Crisander lived alone next door