Al’s eyes floated up to this disturbance. The butt corked his smirk into a pucker. He sucked, dragging till his cheeks folded in over his molars and the cigarette smoldered down to a teeny elephant trunk of ash.

Blew.

Ash fell to the floor without a sound. Behind the cloud, Al’s cheeks were stoplights.

“Okeydokey.” The cigarette hissed in a cone of gin. In a British accent he said, “Shall we?”

“Let’s.”

Henry stood up and immediately collapsed against Michelle’s chair. This gave him the idea to help slide her chair back from the table, but the unexpected chivalry sent her straight to the floor. The three of them erupted, cackling like senators, tycoons, gangsters, and, as he peeled her off the ground, Al withdrew a drum of cash. He flicked bills into the air and over the plates, shells, and bones. Henry paused, watching a bill drift and twirl, a dead leaf in the breeze. His thoughts leapt to his sixteenth birthday, the twenty-dollar bill for bus fare a sudden anvil in his lap. Then to his hopeless appraisal of Papa’s dollar-cent weight, after he’d cashed the life insurance check. Something new was blazing inside him, a power. The strength to incinerate their burdens, to reduce doubts to ash. Cinders. Soot. Bone. But before he arrived at an idyllic locale to finally spread Papa’s remains, Henry’s elbow was hooked, and the trio stagger-strutted their way outside.

After a pit stop at the liquor store, they stormed into the singlewide with a bottle of Dom Pérignon and one of Jack Daniel’s. Al offered them each a pale green pill. Only Michelle accepted. She smacked her mouth and dry-swallowed before Henry could send a protest through the haze of seafood and booze, but really, what did it matter? One little pill of basically the same shit the doctors would be pumping into her veins once her water broke couldn’t hurt. Even though he’d passed on the downer, he was greedy with the lines, after Al pulled a mirror off the wall and whitewashed their reflections with the rest of the vial’s contents.

They popped the champagne and drank it out of jelly jars, still gauzy where labels had once clung. The bubbles disappeared as quickly as the pill took hold of Michelle, making putty of all her edges and pressing her deep into the couch. Her head bobbed to and fro, and she smiled, giggled, and then, almost timidly, asked Henry if she could see it. Touch it, like.

“Can I watch?” Al said.

“No, you perv,” she said. “I mean the money. The cash, like.”

To see the exact same urge take her confirmed everything for Henry. They were made for each other. They were puzzle pieces.

“Of course you can.”