I’m kind of mad about it—Mark and Trisha’s attempts to make everything seem normal and happy—until I pass Mom in her chair, staring at the TV. There’s just as many ways to handle grief as there are emojis, I guess.

They all suck.

Mark must have turned on the seat warmer for me when he left his office, because when I sit down, the cushiony leather beneath my butt and lower back feels warm through my shirt. I lean into the heat with a sigh.

“You do know that it is nearly eighty degrees outside?” He half smiles at me as he backs the car out, its tires jumping over my crumbling driveway.

I give one of my new false, dry chuckles, the humorless one that has replaced my too-exuberant laughs since the funeral.

“Yes, but like all Texans, you run the air-conditioning below freezing,” I say. “Thanks for the seat heater.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The windshield wiper blades squeak angrily against the rain as Mark drives us from my crappy neighborhood to downtown Dallas, to where huge homes sit in orderly rows behind wrought iron fences.

The first time I came to their house, it was obviously different from mine in every way. Most notably, it homed two parents who loved each other almost as much as they loved their daughter.

As it became my second home, I explored its nooks and crannies. It’s a Croatian style, so it has almost as much stone inside as it does on the exterior, and Mrs. Williams—Trisha. Call her Trisha—has covered the walls with this great art.

My favorite is a piece by Vincent van Gogh. It’s actually a print—the original is in a museum an hour away, in Fort Worth—and it shows brightly colored houses along a street in a small Mediterranean fishing village. Van Gogh went pretty heavy with the paint; the viewer can see clumps and heavy streaks on the vibrant rooftops, even in the print. It’s like what he saw with his eyes was too much for his head to hold and he had to get it out in any way he could. It’s a strange piece, melancholy and hopeful in the way the colors fight for attention, and it manages to suggest so much in just one frame. Even though it is an oil painting, it makes me feel as if I’ll never be as good a photographer, never be able to capture anything in such a vibrant, genuine way.

I’m looking at the painting now, avoiding Trisha’s and Mark’s eyes as we eat chicken fingers on porcelain plates at the dining table. Trisha uses a fork and knife to cut hers, but Mark and I both use our fingers.