Casey had an extra bedroom, but I stayed on the couch. “I can’t sleep in a bed,” I told her. “Not yet, anyway.” I gave Frank’s things to Casey; she kept them in the boxes they came in, stacked in her bedroom. “You might still want them back,” she said. I kept my boxes stacked between the end of the couch and the wall. “You can at least use the closet in the other room,” Casey said. I didn’t. I didn’t know how long I would be there. I was more restless than I thought I would be, no matter how comfortable Casey tried to make things.

—

After a week or so, we fell into a rhythm. I worked regular hours and came and went at predictable intervals. Casey’s schedule was more erratic—she was gone for long stretches some days, then would come home and sleep for a few hours and then go back to the hospital—but she was around enough that we could have dinner together and then watch TV before the day ended. She never asked me questions. She never talked about Frank unless I talked about him first. She never talked about anything personal unless I initiated it. She talked about her work, or things in the news. “We didn’t have to do surgery after all,” she told me about a patient she’d been worried about. Or, “There used to be twelve different types of elephants, now there are only three. You know why a land animal can’t get as big as a whale? Gravity.” She knew what to say; she was distracting me. We were good distractions for each other. I slept better on Casey’s couch (which was at least three inches too short for me to stretch out on) then I had in a long time. We had developed our own patterns and rhythms and part of that was going to meetings. I went to her meetings.

I never said much, but listened to the families of addicts talk about the trauma and impact on their lives. I could hear Casey talk with Frank’s same words, with her similar face, and its easy pleasantness, but her words wouldn’t reach people the way Frank could; she couldn’t make them work the way Frank could. People heard Casey; they would nod their heads and agree, but they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let the words work on them and affect them the way they did when Frank said the same things. It was the same message, but the messenger made the difference. I didn’t want it to be that way; I wanted Casey to connect; I wanted people to listen to her and absorb the good things she was saying, but it rarely happened. I never said anything to her.