Now Ellis was gone and the chair remained. Like roaches and Styrofoam, it would probably survive a nuclear blast and be unearthed at some unimaginable point in the future by post-historic aliens, who would marvel at the blinding hideousness of its green and orange design. They’d never know of the absolute dearness of its most frequent occupant, with his intermittent blond beards and his irritating inability to gain weight and his weirdly endearing tendency to correct other people’s grammar. They wouldn’t know about his insane plan to abandon financial security and traipse off to the wilds of Connecticut to grow organic vegetables and make birdhouses.

Bawling openly now, Compton let her tears fall on the chair, as if christening it with her pain. In her current state of dysfunction, this seemed reasonable. Maybe the chair would cry too, if it could. Surely it missed Ellis. For fuck’s sake, she was losing her mind, anthropomorphizing a piece of insensate furniture. Was this a normal part of grief?

Without giving herself time to consider her actions, Compton jumped to her feet and set off down the hall. She passed the door to her bedroom and slowed as she reached the door to the boys’ room. Moving with exquisite care, she twisted the handle and crept into the room. Lawrence slept flat on his back, legs crossed, his hands behind his head, as if he were a ruminative sunbather. He always slept in weird positions, like a living art installation. Boy in Contemplation of the Heavens.

Baby Walter slept like a baby, complete with a thumb in his mouth and his fat diapered bottom up in the air. Cautiously, Compton scooped him up, rotating him so his head rested in the crook of her arm. He stirred and ejected his thumb but didn’t awaken. She carried him back down the hall to Ellis’s chair and eased into it. The solid little tank of the family, Baby Walter had failed to inherit the leanness of either of his parents. Now that he was eighteen months old, he had the heft of a small hippo. The mass of his toddler head on Compton’s inner elbow produced a sizzling pain along the distribution of her ulnar nerve, but she squeezed the compact warm mass of him as if he were a lifeline. When you thought about it, he was a lifeline, a literal flesh-and-blood link to his father.

“I miss your daddy,” she told him. “You don’t know how pissed he would be to miss seeing you turn into a person. You’re fashioning your own ideas and beliefs and accomplishments; you learn something new every day. You are remarkable.” Compton kissed his head and paused, honesty compelling her to reflect that Baby Walter’s main opinion that week had revolved around a firm conviction that potty training was not for him. Still.