Back before it happened, it was rare that Archie got in trouble at school or on the home front. And when he did, it wasn’t usually anything particularly serious. There was that broken second-floor window when he crashed a friend’s drone through it. (It was his own bedroom; had it been Katie’s, she’d have accused him of trying to spy on her.) And there was the time he got tar on a brand-new pair of jeans and, even though he had never run the washing machine himself, tried to clean them himself rather than let his mother find out. That turned into a 1950s sitcom episode, what with Archie overloading the machine with a dozen soap pods and nearly filling the laundry room from floor to ceiling with suds.

When their dad got home, he couldn’t stop laughing.

It was a happier time, what with Dad being alive and all. It was funny, how you never know you’re in the good times until the shitty times kick in.

So why, Katie wondered, had Archie turned into an asshole when she had not? (She believed she was being pretty objective here in concluding that she was as wonderful now as she’d ever been.) Maybe, she wondered, losing a father was even harder on a boy. But that seemed pretty sexist. Didn’t she miss him as much as he did? Of course she did, but she had to concede that interests in the household tended to run along gender lines. Archie loved all things mechanical and could spend hours in the shop with his father. The two of them would often spend a Sunday afternoon there and return home grease-stained and smelling of oil. He was only twelve, but he could diagnosis any kind of problem in their gas-powered Lawn-Boy. It drove Katie nuts, when it was her time to cut the lawn and the machine conked out, that she had to get her little brother to get it going again.

Once, a few months after their dad had died, and his repair shop had been sold off, Archie disappeared. Sandra had been seconds away from calling the police when Katie suggested they check the shop, which, while sold, was still sitting empty while the new owners readied their plans to renovate it. Sure enough, it was where they found him. He’d busted a window, crawled in, and fallen asleep sitting at his father’s oil-stained desk, his head on the table.

Katie’s interests had always been more in line with her mother’s. Media issues, real estate. While Archie and Adam were in the garage, tearing apart an Evinrude outboard motor to see what made it tick, there was a good chance Katie and Sandra were going from one open house to another. Katie, at one point, had even floated the idea of taking some architectural courses in Boston.