The rope isn’t lashed around a branch. The branches of the pear tree aren’t strong enough to hold that kind of weight. Rather, the hanging rope is wound around the trunk and cinched against the base of a branch—a rig-up for support. So that when hanged there, back against the trunk, Chris Coyne’s legs would find only weaker, lighter branches that would not and could not bear his weight and save his life.

Many of those smaller branches are broken. From his kicking feet.

His tongue out, swollen. Eyes open, the whites full of blood.

A note tucked in his pocket, written in his own handwriting: If you want a rainbow, you have to put up with the rain. Then a second sentence: It gets better.

It’s Shane who calls and tells Atlanta what happened.

He can barely tell the story. He mostly cries. Chris was his best friend.

And now Chris is dead.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They all stand around in the wet grass, everybody wearing sunglasses or squinting against the light. The thought running through Atlanta’s head is Funerals shouldn’t happen on nice days. Should be illegal. Doesn’t seem right. Big bright sun and broad blue sky above. The night before saw weather far better suited to the day at hand: rain and thunder and clamor and clatter, and that’s how Atlanta feels inside, like there’s a tornado in a teapot screaming and howling so loud in her ears she can barely hear the graveside service. A service ringed in flowers.

Flowers on the ground. Flowers on tripods. Flowers on lapels.

And early though the laurel grows . . .

Her friend is dead. Lowered into the earth. And she wants to be there with him.

With the worms and the roots. It’s where she belongs.

The beer bottle breaks against the grave with a pop. Green glass lands in the grass. Atlanta has nothing against Nancy Tottlemeyer—the grave against which she’s broken three Yuengling bottles so far—but it’s the easiest target, and Atlanta doesn’t give much of a shit right now. Because dear Nancy got a long life, damn near eighty years, and for that, fuck her right in her dead old-lady ear.

Atlanta rubs her eyes. Tightens her neck, her jaw, to ward off crying. Drinks more.

The bitter beer coats Atlanta’s tongue like a soap-scum sheen. She fetches a bottle of cheap Polish vodka from her bag, spins the cap, takes a pull. Clean white fire. Liquid. Bright.

She sits like that for a while, next to Chris’s gravestone, which is a modest stone that does not suit him. The stone shows a copse of pine trees and the silhouette of a mallard duck flying from the brush. Then his name and the dates that frame his life like a pair of parentheses.