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up.
    Remy couldn’t think of a single word to say.
    Carla spoke up. “But Edgar, honey. This isn’t a story you wrote. This is something you’re allowing your classmates to believe. Your homeroom teacher said that you sit at your desk crying. She said you got out of a physics test and that you’ve stopped going to PE altogether.”
    “Yeah…”
    “Well, I guess I don’t understand.”
    Edgar shrugged as if it were the simplest thing. “If I had lost my father, would you really expect me to take a test? Or to play Frisbee golf?”
    “Well…no. I guess not.”
    “Okay,” Edgar said, as if that solved it.
    Carla shifted on the couch, so that she was facing their son. She broke out her gentle relationship voice, the one Remy recalled from the awful counseling sessions they tried before the split. “Honey, is it that you don’t get to see your father enough? Is that what this is about?”
    Edgar cocked his head.
    “That he works too much, sweetie? That he’s gone all the time.”
    “No.”
    “Is it his drinking? Are you trying to tell your father that his lifestyle is going to kill him? Is this a kind of metaphoric death you’ve created for him? Is that what you’re trying to tell us, honey?”
    Remy wondered how far this line of questioning would go. Maybe this was about the time he flirted with that waitress in front of Carla.Or maybe it was about the fact that he didn’t like her family. The way he used to drop his dirty clothes next to the bed?
    Steve leaned forward helpfully. “Is it to impress chicks, Eddie? Is that what you’re doing, ol’ buddy? Trying to get a little sympathy ass?”
    “No, Steve,” Edgar said patiently. “I’m not trying to get…ass.”
    Remy wished he could infuse his own voice with as much flatness when he spoke to Carla’s new husband, that he could speak so ironically with such an apparent lack of irony. Suddenly, his pride for his child overwhelmed him, and Remy flashed on the idea that if he actually had died, he might save Edgar this awkward questioning.
    “Well, I think we deserve an explanation,” Carla said. “That’s all.”
    The boy looked around the room for help. When Edgar was little, Remy used to find solace in the shards of himself that he saw in the boy’s in-trouble stare, in his shrugs and shifts, in the things he feared. But now Edgar was so self-assured that Remy could barely remember why his son had ever needed whatever shelter he’d once provided. Edgar was a stranger to him, an alien with long, blocky hair and sinewy arms and a clipped, hyper-intellectual way of speaking that made it seem as if he were reading.
    “Okay,” his son said. “First of all, by agreeing to talk about this, I want you to know that I’m not apologizing. This is entirely my business.” Edgar took a deep breath and stared at the carpet. “Grieving is personal.”
    “That’s fine, Edgar, honey. But what are you grieving? The divorce? Your father’s inability to commit emotionally—”
    Remy interrupted: “You know, I think we’ve covered that.”
    “I’m grieving my dead father!” Edgar was losing his patience. “I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand.”
    “But…your father isn’t dead, honey.”
    “I know that.” Edgar rubbed his temples, as if talking to these morons was more than he could bear. “Weren’t there fathers who died that day?”
    “Of course they did.”
    “And didn’t they leave children behind?”
    “Sure.”
    “And didn’t I have a father?”
    “Yes. Of course.”
    He put his arms out as if finishing a magic trick. “Then why is it so hard to believe that I could be grieving the same thing as those other children? I suppose you’d rather I behave like everyone else and grieve generally . Well, I’m sorry. I’m not built that way. General grief is a lie. What are people in Wyoming really grieving? A loss of safety? Some shattered illusion that a lifetime of purchases and television programs had meaning? The