“Bash in Steve’s headlights. That’s not what happened. Mark didn’t do it.”

“Yeah he did,” Ray tells me, then snaps to attention. “Wait, he didn’t?”

“No. Steve cracked his headlight pulling into his garage after Mark’s Fourth of July party last year.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

“Oh,” Ray says. “Well, I told Bobby that Mark fired a warning shot and it worked.”

“You’d better hope he doesn’t try to impress you by one-upping Mark.”

“Yeah, right,” says Ray. “Like Bobby’s got a violent bone in his body.”

“Maybe not violent,” I concede, “but desperate.”

“Fair enough.”

At least Raymond can see it. He’s so good at overlooking his friends’ flaws, but I guess that’s the upside of devotion. My husband’s loyalty is both the sexiest and most annoying thing about him, just as Bobby’s reliance upon my husband is both his most endearing and most insufferable quality. I love Bobby like family—but more in the vein of brother-in-law than brother. My love for Bobby exists through Raymond. And anyway, his reaction is not our responsibility. Bobby may be impressionable, but he’s a grown man, for crying out loud.

It’s too easy to see him, still, as that kid we met when our paths merged in middle school. In that first week of the sixth grade, the three of us found ourselves aligned, our last names stacked alphabetically back-to-back, quickly triangulating our awkwardness into something remarkably strong. If my maiden name had been Smith instead of Hawthorne, there’s a pretty good chance I’d have never given Bobby a second thought. Of course, I’d like to think I would’ve still married Raymond, even if he wasn’t a Harrison—that I wouldn’t have ended up with a Smerda twin instead. I shudder to think it.

Bobby was a bit like Mowgli back then: scrawny, scrappy, out of place but not really aware of it. I guess he found his personal Bagheera in Ray. What would that have made me? Baloo? Fuck it. I’ll be Baloo. We were a solid threesome, and later, a solid two-plus-one. Ray went out of his way to be sure Bobby never felt left out after we coupled up—sometimes to the point of overcompensation, in my opinion, but I couldn’t be mad about that. Bobby was my date to every football game so we could act the fools as Raymond’s personal fan club; and if one of us was sick, Bobby would get our assignments and help us finish them so we could rest. It was never a hassle to include him. It was always just love.

Such a decent kid. So fucking smart. So clueless, too. So powerless against his dad’s obsession with pedigree. Bobby inherited it, like a disease. Mowgli deserved better.