“We have fun here,” Jett said. “Lots of fun.”

“Doing what? Roping cows and eating pigs?”

“Let me show you,” he said, and leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. He’d only kissed two other girls, but this time was clearly the best. Roni squirmed at first, but in time he found that her hand was on his leg, and then her tongue was searching his teeth. A thought flashed through his mind: I, Jett Kaplan, am the greatest lover in the world.

Eventually there developed an abundance of saliva that made Roni gag. They pulled apart and wiped their mouths and stared at each other like two strangers who had just witnessed the same plane crash.

Jett cleared his throat. “Would you like to do me a favor, Roni?”

“What is it?”

Jett looked down at his pants. He was wearing a pair of cargo shorts his mother had bought on clearance at Kohl’s. He’d hated them at first, but now wore them often.

“You want me to do something with it?” she asked, gesturing toward his crotch.

He nodded, surprised by how easily she’d understood. “If you’d like to, why not?”

“I’ve never done it before,” Roni said.

This was a lie. The whole freshman class knew that Roni had lost her virginity the year before, to an older guy at Camp B’nai B’rith. But perhaps she couldn’t remember exactly how the act had transpired. As the story went, she’d had three whole bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

“It’ll be fun,” Jett said. “That’s what you want, right? Fun? American fun?”

She frowned. “Okay, but only if we can do it in your dad’s room.”

“What? Why not here? What’s wrong with here?”

She looked at his bedspread and sighed.

Of course. Toy Story. What had his mother been thinking? It was something a five year old would have in his room. “If that’s really what you want,” he said. “But we have to be quiet.”

They crept down the hall to the master bedroom. When his mother was alive, Jett and his parents used to watch movies in their bed. Jett would squeeze between the two of them or perch at the end, his bare feet kicking the air. Sometimes his mother would set a bowl of popcorn on his back. Aaron, isn’t it about time we get a new table? This one’s tilted. And look—it’s got such long hair. I do wish it would get a haircut. Occasionally, if his father was in a good mood, he’d play along. I’m not sure, Melanie. You know how expensive tables can be. And this one was such a steal. What are the chances we’ll salvage another perfectly good table from a Dumpster fire? Now, this kind of behavior was out of the question. Even memories of this nature were not allowed in the house after the funeral. Nothing, in fact, was allowed in the house after the funeral. Everything that had belonged to his mother—her Agatha Christie novels, her ceramic teapot with the cherry blossoms, her menorahs—all of it was donated to Jett’s aunt Esther. All that remained was a thin orange cardigan that hung, inexplicably, from the back of a chair in the dining room. “It’s better this way,” his father had assured him. And perhaps it was. Jett dreaded the day he would visit his aunt Esther’s house—the avalanche of his mother, one coffee mug at a time.