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explain things in my own words, but I did my best. “He was laid up in the hospital during a bad time, when he was sort of shut off from the world. And the sound of my voice was like…you know, the father he never had. Well, he had one, actually, but he was a monster.” Anna, to my discomfort, was still frowning. “He told you all that?”
    “Not on the phone. In the book.”
    “Oh.” She weighed that for a moment. “That’s kind of intimidating.”
    “How so?”
    “I just mean…well, it’s a big compliment, Gabriel, but it’s really intense for somebody to lay that on you.”
    I resisted the notion that some worrisome new burden had been dumped in my lap. Pete himself had never come close to suggesting as much. “He didn’t lay anything on me,” I said calmly. “I know he sounds like some tragic waif, but he’s not. He’s really bright and funny, and he can hold his own with grownups. The father thing was just something he shared, that’s all. It didn’t come with any strings attached. Really.” Even to my own ears, this declaration sounded anxious and overstated, so I abandoned it immediately.
    “I’m done with the galleys,” I said, “if you’d like to look at them.”
    “Thanks,” said Anna, turning back to the computer. “I’ve got too much reading for school already.”
    That night I cooked myself a real meal—my first since Jess had left.
    Hugo smelled the chicken roasting and made his way stiffly down the stairs, obviously expecting to share in this bonanza. I could hardly refuse him; taste was his last surviving sense, the only cheap thrill he had left. I tossed a chunk of meat on the porch and watched as he tore into it like a T. rex , mumbling lasciviously under his breath.
    Then I collapsed on the sofa and lit my first joint in weeks.
    It wasn’t like me to have gone without grass that long. I’ve been a confirmed pothead half my life, finding release in my nightly joint the way the other Gabriel Noones have found it in their bourbon.
    But I also know that dope erases nothing, merely underscores that which is already there. Now that Jess was gone I was wary of facing my solitude stoned. Who knew what fresh terrors might emerge in the wide-screen version of my grief?
    But something had changed already. My one conversation with Pete had brought me the childish consolations of laughter and spontaneity. I wanted more of that, I guess, so I convinced myself—only moments before I called him—that a toke or two couldn’t hurt.
    He answered on the fourth ring, his voice small and tentative, like an engine that hadn’t yet warmed up. “Hello.”
    “It’s Gabriel, Pete.”
    A pause and then: “Oh, hi, Gabe.”
    “Make it Gabriel, okay?”
    “What?”
    “I’m not real big on that nickname.”
    “Well, ‘scuse the fuck outa me.”
    “Hey,” I said, “I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t want us to be friends.” I explained to him that the people closest to me never call me Gabe, that the surest indicator of a complete stranger is anyone who flings that nickname around as if we’ve known each other forever.
    “But half the things I’ve ever read…”
    “I know. They’re wrong.”
    “What does Jess call you?”
    “Gabriel.”
    “No he doesn’t.”
    “Pete…”
    “He calls you Sweetie or Babe.” The boy’s tone was triumphant.
    “Am I right?”
    “Well…yeah. Sometimes.” Not lately, I thought. Not for this hellish eternity of a fortnight. And here we were on the subject I had desperately hoped to bury—at least for the evening. Already I regretted that joint.
    “Wanna know how I know?” asked Pete.
    “Know what?”
    “That he calls you that.”
    “How?”
    “Because Jamie calls Will that on Noone at Night .”
    “Clever.”
    “I thought so.”
    “Except that those guys aren’t us.”
    “Says who?”
    “Says the guy who wrote it.”
    “But you met him on a tour of Alcatraz, right? With all those little Catholic girls?”
    “Not