“After searching around the woods for an hour and thinking it was lost forever, yeah. But then a couple of days later I’m walking out the cans to the street for trash day—your job, by the way—when surprise, surprise, guess what’s sitting inside, upside down?”

Whit holds the plaque out to me and I feel more tears.

Whit points to the shovel at my feet. “I’m thinking we just kind of prop it up and slightly bury the bottom of it rather than screw it into the poor trees, whaddya think?”

And the tears just keep coming, they just keep rolling, as we dig a small trench, wedge the plaque inside.

And I don’t know, whereas it was the dumbest idea before, it makes sense now.

It makes sense here.

JADA & ANDRE ANDERSON.

NEVER FORGET.

And that’s how we came to finish my nearly two-year-old Carpet Denim.

With five people who in the last four days have had enough arguments to fuel a small war. And yet, here we are, somehow finding a way to band together. To put the past behind us.

Because sometimes the best family are the people you choose in spite of the bad stuff.

Five people who didn’t always see eye to eye but loved each other regardless, scattering our two beloved parents among seven new trees in one lucky-to-have-them nature preserve.

32

“We should get an early dinner,” Whit says before we’re even out of the nature preserve.

Q votes Chinese food, but Ms. B overrules him, says nobody wants to be around him post–Chinese food, which, truth.

I toss out Italian and everyone agrees, pasta’s it.

“But homemade noodles,” Ms. B insists.

So we hit up the grocery store, then lug our haul into our house, Ms. B immediately asking Whit where we keep our pots and pans.

“Go deep,” I say, and Q pretends to run a go route into the living room and I deliver the bag of garlic right on time, hitting his hands in perfect stride.

“Okay,” Ms. B says. “If you two drop any food, or break anything, you’ll be handwashing every pot and pan after dinner.”

“Welp. So much for that,” Q says.

“Fun while it lasted,” I chime.

Ms. B rolls up her sleeves and puts in serious work, whips together a batch of her killer spaghetti, homemade sauce with ingredients she won’t let us see her add, the four of us taking turns trying to ambush her, or distract her, but all our efforts are for naught and Ms. B’s recipe stays secret.

She doesn’t even crack when Q, Autumn, and I offer up our garlic-bread-seasoning recipe in exchange for her sauce recipe—she actually kind of offends us, the way she turns her nose up, as if we somehow aren’t offering items of equal value, but whatever, her loss.