Izzy walked away from Larry and the tiki heads with their empty wooden sockets. “Didn’t ask how I’m doing,” Larry called after her. “But it’s all good in paradise.”

Her father was an optimist; she had to give him that. He said you had to be, in order to survive out here. Or anywhere.

◆◆◆

After she had dropped off some flyers with Leanne and Jody—not really expecting either of them, especially Leanne, to be of much help—Izzy went back to see Seth and Nephy at the house where Izzy and Cyrus had met almost a decade ago. The memory shimmered in her mind, as if the house had been lit up with candles and stocked with glass bottles of wine, the pool filled with water. But there had only been a lava lamp, cheap beer in tin cans, an empty concrete basin where people ashed their cigarettes and shattered their bones.

Nephy answered the door wearing a T-shirt that said “Lady of the House.” Her belly stuck out over the top of her sweatpants; her hair scraped back off her face as if with the dull edge of a butter knife. She looked worried and tired, nothing like her usual bored, glamorous self. “Izzy,” she said. “What can I do?”

Izzy shook her head. Nothing. No one could do anything. But she hadn’t wanted to be alone. Now, seeing Nephy looking so different than she had just one day ago, obviously worried about Cyrus, Izzy felt herself crumbling, and Nephy reached out and led her over to the couch. The couch where at a party almost a decade ago she’d fallen in love. The swamp cooler hummed, chilling the air. A fever chill.

“Izzy?” Nephy said again, putting her arm around Izzy’s trembling shoulders.

“I’m going to find him.” Izzy’s fingers plucked at some stuffing exploding from the couch’s innards, then she tried to jam the white synthetic material back in. She swallowed the insect-sized lump in her throat and wouldn’t look at Nephy.

“Izzy…” A perfect little vertical line formed between Nephy’s brows. Izzy couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.

“I’m going to go see everyone.”

Nephy put her hands on her swelling belly, rubbing in circles. She stretched out her legs in front of her and pointed and flexed her feet with the French pedicure—shell-pink with a wider-than-natural white tip. Her big toe joints looked like distended knobs of bone from the toe-crushing, cartilage-destroying high-heeled shoes she liked to wear.

“Izzy,” she repeated, a third time, staring at her feet, shaking her head. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I can’t stop,” she said.

◆◆◆

Nephy made Izzy lie down and stroked her head until she fell asleep. When she woke from her nap, she smelled dinner cooking—cornbread and chili with pinto beans, hot peppers, and onions fried in olive oil. Izzy realized she hadn’t had anything to eat since the night before.

Izzy and Seth sat at the Formica kitchen table with the blue-and-white-checked vinyl cloth while Nephy still futzed around in her chintz apron, skulls hidden among the cabbage roses. The three of them were like some messed up version of a suburban family, Izzy thought. Without Cyrus, Izzy became the child, the wayward overgrown daughter, staring blankly at her plate of food.