I breathe through it. “Of course, Son. Whatever I can do to support you.”

So now I’ll have to ask Simone to cancel my appointments and reschedule two dozen patients, a burden she’ll add to her growing list of complaints. She’ll be even bitchier about delaying our meeting.

Jonah heads upstairs, and I tell Elizabeth, “We’ll need to book a room in the Catskills. Last minute. Won’t be cheap.”

“I’ll do it,” she snaps, but she’ll regret it. We’re going to be the spectacle. Nick was staying with us. People know this. They’ll ask questions. Who’s to say Nick kept his tryst with Elizabeth a secret? Who’s to say he didn’t tell someone about the diagnosis. I say softly to Elizabeth, “People are going to want to know about our relationships with Nick. Some of them will have heard about us already.”

She doesn’t flinch. She just says, “It’s not about us, Robert.”

“Maybe not, but it affects us, and I hate funerals, Elizabeth. I hate going when they’re for people I love, let alone someone I hardly knew. I’ll be there. It’s settled, but it’s stressful.”

“How inconvenient for you,” she says.

“We’re going, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” she says. “We are.”

22.

The drive to Bovina takes five hours, but we leave a little late, so we’re only a little early for the one o’clock funeral, pulling up to the area Interfaith Center at twelve forty exactly. Jonah slept in the back the whole time, and Elizabeth read, and I drove. In the trunk is a duffle bag filled with Nick’s things. How Jonah plans to deliver it to Nick’s aunt without making a scene is beyond me, but he insisted, and I relented, so here we are.

In the sanctuary beyond the foyer, an organist plays “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” My mother got that one, too, by request. Mounted on either end of the room are signs with arrows pointing toward curved corridors. The arrow pointing left reads, Chapels. Prayer Rooms. Classrooms. Men’s Room. The one pointing right: Library. Altars. Exit to Meditation Garden. Ladies’ Room. And in the middle, the tributes. There was no visitation, and an open casket was never in the cards, not with a body as badly decomposed as Nick’s had been, so in lieu of a formaldehyde-soaked cadaver covered in grease paint, we are forced to acknowledge phantoms tacked to corkboard: a portrait, a diploma, a handwritten letter to God. Beside the guest book are scrapbooks stuffed with blue ribbons, newspaper clippings, notes and Polaroids, class pictures, photo booth strips, report cards. Garish flower wreaths and headshots hang from easels by the door.

“I didn’t know Nick swam competitively,” I say to Jonah.

“In high school, yeah. Turned down a couple scholarships, I think.”

“Why did he quit?”

“Wanted to, I guess.”