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the train down to visit me. Two of his high school friends went to New Hampton, and the three of them took me out that weekend. It was typical that Max should show me around my own campus. Though he was only a year older, I had always followed his lead.
    I hadn’t socialized much in the first two months of the semester. Each Friday afternoon I’d ridden New Jersey Transit into Penn Station to spend the weekend with my mother. She insisted it wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t feel right going out with friends while she stayed at home so soon after my father’s death. His illness had been a slow process of subtraction—his hair was taken, his strength, his teeth, his mind—so that it was hard to say exactly what was lost on that day a few weeks before my graduation from St. Albert’s when the last of him went. Yet nothing that came before had prepared us for it. It may be that whatever remained of his consciousness was relieved to have it end, but I wanted only for him to still be there, even in all his suffering.
    When my father was alive, we’d eaten at the table in the dining room, but now it seemed too big for us. My mother would make dinner on Friday night, and we would sit on stools at the kitchen counter while we ate. Each weekend I arrived with the hope of being a comfort, but once I was with her I found it impossible. I suppose I wanted her to comfort me, though I knew that this too was impossible. She asked about my classes, but there wasn’t much to say,
since I wasn’t going to most of them, having discovered that I could get away with doing almost no work at New Hampton. I had already decided never to submit to the rituals of job interviews and grad school applications, so grades meant little to me. I only needed to pass so I could take my fiction workshop. I stayed in my room, writing stories or reading the books that Sophie mentioned on our walks back from class, while my textbooks sat untouched.
    After we’d exhausted my academic life as a topic of discussion, my mother would ask about my classmates and my social life. It was Friday night and I was eating dinner with my mother an hour away from campus—that was my social life. Sophie was the only person I’d met who mattered to me, and I was somehow unable even to mention her name.
    My mother was still working, ostensibly at least, as a real estate agent, but she had stopped picking up listings while taking care of my father, and she was struggling to get back to it. I wanted to learn how she was doing, but I didn’t know where to begin such a conversation. “What fills your days?” I might have asked, but who asks such a thing? What answer could she have given that I was prepared to hear? My presence did nothing for her suffering except embarrass it with an audience.
    An open bottle of wine sat on the counter between us each night. I generally drank a glass or two while my mother drank the rest. Sometimes I drank more, so that there would be less left for her, but this approach had its own risks. If I took too much from the bottle, she would open another. After dinner, we went to her room, where we climbed into bed together and watched reruns until she fell asleep. She woke when I turned off the TV, so I learned to leave it on, lowering the volume a bit before creeping to the door and dimming
the lights. Then I headed down the hall with a sour taste in my mouth to spend the rest of the weekend as I would have had I been at school—alone in my room. By the time I left, we both felt a bit worse than we had upon my arrival, and I told myself that I would stay on campus from then on. But when Friday came around again, I went back to New York.
    This continued until Thanksgiving, which we spent with Max and his parents at their apartment. After that, I stayed three days in my room, working on a short story whose details I have since entirely forgotten.
    â€œYou need to have a normal life at