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on? Shouldn’t we all be too upset to do any of that?
    His car smells good. He closes the door for me and I put my seat belt on. He fixes the radio so it’s low enough for us to talk and then he pulls out of my driveway and starts off down the road. The funeral is three towns over. I guess it makes sense I didn’t know them. Despite what Erie said, it’s reasonable I wouldn’t know someone who lived three towns over. If they kept to themselves. Didn’t go to a lot of parties. I might not know them.
    “You’re quiet,” he says.
    It’s there again. This pull. This gravity. I realize I’m happy and I don’t know why. I feel a degree of happiness I haven’t hoped for in years. A calm, a stillness. I’m hoping he gets lost, that we drive around in circles until we both die, stopping only for gas and water when we’re thirsty and snacks when we’re hungry. I will put my hand on his leg when he drives and he will sing me lullabies when I can’t sleep and I realize I’ve never wanted any of this before. I’ve never felt a connection to someone like this and I’m wondering if it’s real. I don’t know why I should feel it now, for Sayer, but it’s here and I’m willing it to stay.
    “I’m sorry,” I reply.
    “You don’t have to apologize.”
    “I like being quiet. I guess.”
    I like being quiet? We both have apples?
    “Molly,” he says then, and the way he says my name, it stirs something inside me. A memory, maybe, or a suggestion. All I know is that it sounds like he’s said my name before. It sounds like he’s practiced saying my name in front of a mirror until he got it completely right.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m really glad you’re coming.”
    “Oh.”
    “I think my brother would have appreciated it.”
    “Were you close?”
    “We were brothers,” he says, and just the way he says it you can tell exactly what he means. We had our disagreements and sometimes we hated each other but he was my brother and someone hit the back tire of his motorcycle and now he is dead. Now we are driving to his funeral and now I have you in my car and now we are making small talk and you shouldn’t have worn that dress. The smell of formaldehyde, it is suffocating me.
    “Right, of course,” I say. I have a brother, too. And Clancy is sad and Clancy is annoying and Clancy murdered all my goldfish when he was seven, picked them out of the bowl by their tails and held them thrashing until their tiny lungs collapsed and I hated him for that. I hated him with the true hatred of a nine-year-old girl, but he is still my brother and my love for him will go beyond death. It will go beyond goldfish and it will go beyond life. And I can’t imagine driving to his funeral. In my mind, he will never die. He and Hazel will never die. They will never age and they will remain constant forever.
    “I still can’t thank you enough,” he says. Out of the corner of my eye I see him look out of the corner of his eye at me. I see one finger of his right hand twitch like he would like to take my hand in his hand but he won’t. He doesn’t.
    “I did what anyone would have done,” I say. But this is a lie. There were other people there and nobody else did what I did. Nobody let the dying boy cough blood all over them. Nobody held the dying boy’s head while he took his last dying breaths. I had to throw my sweater out. My favorite sweater, I pushed it to the bottom of the trash can and then I crumpled up pages of an old newspaper and I threw the pages in the trash until I couldn’t see the sweater anymore. Blood doesn’t come out. That much blood, it wouldn’t have come out and so I didn’t even try.
    “I don’t think there are many people who would have done what you did,” Sayer says.
    And then we’re quiet. I look out the window, and everything seems foreign. We might as well be in a different country, a different universe. We might as well be in the future or in the past. Nothing seems familiar to me anymore. The