“Cham,” my dad says, wheeling closer to me. “Why would you want to sit around with your old man and watch Netflix for the whole summer?” He looks over at the TV like Can you believe this girl?

“We don’t have to just watch TV,” I say, suddenly frustrated and wishing I hadn’t brought this up at all. “I could read to you about the boring art of motorcycle maintenance. I was probably supposed to read that like two months ago for school anyway.”

“Don’t tell me that, Cham,” my dad says, picking the book up off the table, then putting it back down at a slightly different orientation. “You loved learning so much as a kid. You know you skipped kindergarten?”

I gasp. “You mean I taught myself how to finger-paint?” He laughs, and I try to say what I mean, which I guess is that time isn’t infinite, not for any of us, but it seems even more finite for him. What comes out is “I’m serious, Dad. I could stay.”

He wheels toward me and pretends to plow me over with his chair. “For me? Nope.”

My mom pokes her head in, cleaning bucket in her rubber-gloved hand. “What’s going on in here?” she asks, searching the room for dust, lint, and hairballs.

“Nothing. Cham was just packing her Nicaragua bag,” my dad says. “Can you bring Mace on an airplane?”

“Sure,” I say eagerly. “I’ll just hide it in my machete case.”

The two of them laugh, and then my mom prods me with her bucket.

“Don’t you have an essay to finish?” She pushes me out of the room, and my dad says something about me “finishing high school on a strong note,” and before I can escape, it’s just me, my mom, and the unfinished essay in my room.

I take my laptop from my desk and hold it like a baby. Maybe if I coddle it properly, the Word document will grow up to be a strong, healthy essay.

“I overheard you talking to Dad,” my mom says, leaning against the door to my room. “That was sweet of you to offer to stay, but you know we’d never want you to. You have a whole future ahead of you.”

“I know,” I say, sinking onto my bed. “But it’s not that simple.”

The silence between us holds a lot of silences that have come before. I feel a boulder in my throat. “I think I forget that he’s not just what’s happening to him,” I say.

She sits on the edge of my bed with me and she kisses my forehead, moving a frizzy curl aside. “I know, baby. I know.”

Suddenly I have so many flavors of bitter and sweet in my mouth that I can’t really taste anything, just coffee and honey, but much more than coffee and much more than honey. “Remember how he played Elvis Christmas songs every day one summer?” She nods. “And how he never remembered Valentine’s Day until the day after, so we always got double amounts of discounted chocolate?”