My dad’s unit came home during the second week of June. He was the third one off the bus, greeted by a crowd waving American flags in a parking lot decked out with tables full of food, strung with red, white, and blue streamers. He walked with crutches and wore a haunted smile.

He spent the next two months on the couch with Landry, watching one cooking show after the next. Planning all the elaborate meals they were going to make for us as soon as he got his cast off. As soon as he got back on his feet.

If you look closely, you can still see his imprint in the far-right couch cushion.

No one sits there anymore.

I wake up Tuesday morning to the horrible electronic bleating of the old-fashioned alarm clock my mother dug out of a box in the garage. I’ve had to use it for the past two days, since phone calls from journalists rendered my cell phone unusable. But I can’t take another hostile wake-up—not to mention the unsettling feeling of being disconnected from the world—so I turn my phone on in the bathroom while I wait for the shower to warm up.

There are three missed calls from numbers I don’t recognize. But even if they’re all from reporters, rather than the usual spam callers, that’s a significant improvement from the weekend.

My Twitter app shows more than three hundred notifications, but I resist the urge to open it. This will blow over soon. People have short attention spans, right?

After my shower, I put on a little makeup, and on the way to the kitchen, I stop when I hear my mother’s voice.

“Those vegetables were delicious,” she says. “Even cold. What did you say they were called?”

“Vegetable tian.” Landry’s sigh is accompanied by the clink of glass, then the slosh of liquid being poured. “You should have warmed it up. Fifteen minutes on three-fifty, and it would have been like new.”

“I was too tired to cook when I got home.”

“That isn’t cooking, Mom. That’s just applying heat to food.”

“Speaking of which …” I step into the kitchen and grab the Pop-Tarts box on the counter, surprised to see that my mom’s still in her bathrobe. She must have overslept.

“You’re going to die of accumulated preservatives,” Landry says as I drop a s’mores-flavored pastry into the toaster.

“Yeah, but at least I’ll go out smiling.”

My smile fades when I notice what she’s wearing over her favorite pair of black leggings. “That’s my sweater.”

“Oh yeah, can I borrow it? You left it in the dryer, and …” She shrugs.

“Well, you’re already wearing it. But ask next time.”

“I promise.” And with that, she sets her empty juice glass in the sink and disappears into the hall.