“You can drive.” I hear myself bargaining, inching toward begging, and shut my mouth. I know better now, learned the hard way, back when Jonah took my love in concentrated doses only. Every other weekend, Vanessa would drop him off so I could flood him with evidence that I’m the cool guy he’ll want to be when he grows up—or at least a guy he’ll want to hang out with of his own accord, paternity notwithstanding. I stocked lures: Xboxes and season tickets, a bottomless supply of Entenmann’s, all the movie channels, all the privacy and autonomy he could want. I swore openly as passive permission to do the same. I learned to grill steaks to perfection. I taught him the same. But boys don’t respond to coddling, to being smothered, and we can’t expect them to respect fathers so available as to deny their sons agency—an essential character vertebra passed down to me by my own father, who may not have been perfect, but who was brave enough to let me want things so I could grow the spine needed to acquire them.

So I say, “Another time, then,” about the boat ride, but now I’m stuck making good on my bluff. Fine. Whatever. Top-tier problem. I’ll head over to check the fuel and scrub algae while Jonah stays home to—what? To grieve? What does grief as a verb even look like, anyway? Inaction. Inactivity. The absorption of sadness compounded by expectation. Public displays of melancholy. Spontaneous meltdowns. Private countdowns. Heaven forbid we tempt the appearance of peace by coping constructively. Heaven forbid we make an effort to flood our brains with serotonin tapped by sunlight and connection. No, the world might find us vulgar and crass—unfeeling, when all we want is to sanitize ourselves from these relentless feelings—and so we reject our bodies’ medicine and feed the nuisance instead. We actively mope, turning a terrible thing into its own organism so we’ll have something to shape and tame and contain: a creature removed from the Terrible Thing. Grief becomes an adorable, shaggy mutt nipping at our heels in the street. We don’t want it, and still it follows us against our will, endearing us to everyone who sees. Making sure everyone sees.

Jonah fiddles with the stereo occasionally, flipping mostly from NPR to silence and back. We’re home before the rush of weekenders begins arriving from the city.

“What about you?” I ask Elizabeth. “Feel like heading out on the boat?”

“Me? No,” she says. “I need a hot shower. Maybe a bath.”

“Lizzie—” I start, but she interrupts me.

“Could you do something for me, please? Don’t call me that. I know you’re being sweet, but it grates on me. It’s infantilizing. And Lizzie is not my name, anyway.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“How could you have never said this to me before?”

She shrugs. “I’m saying it now.”