Overall, I felt new. Lobotomized. I decided I was ready for the next step.

Krystal and I didn’t talk for two whole months after I stormed out of Geannie’s house, until she called me out of the blue one day. “You want to come over Friday?” she asked. And things resumed as before.

I didn’t bring up the house after we reconnected. After our fight, if that is what it had been, I had started taking a different route to work.

Honestly, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see the house and I didn’t want to see Krystal’s car. Grief was ugly and embarrassing. The word itself, grief, embarrassed me, something that dated back to childhood. After my father killed himself, my teetotaler mother went from her usual quiet self to almost totally silent, but still carried on exactly the same as before, for seven months, before she went out one night, got blind drunk, and accidentally drove her car into the front window of the local pharmacy. No one was hurt in the crash and no charges were filed. (I was thirteen at the time, and for years afterward I wondered where and how my mother had gotten drunk—as far as I knew, she had never stepped foot inside a liquor store or bar, and would have died of shame to do so.) When she died years later, I found out my mother had paid for the damages in installments over several years. But at the time, the police officer who brought her home told me to put her to bed for a while. “Your mama’s grieving,” he’d said, making me turn scarlet. “She’s had a bad time of it.” Then he left.

I was overwhelmed with shame that was amplified by fear. Your mama’s grieving. The phrase frightened me the same as if he’d told me she had cancer. Here I had figured she was fine, and that whatever sadness I felt over my father’s death was because I was a dumb kid, and a girl, and everyone knew how girls were prone to maudlin feelings. Adults, I wanted to believe, went largely unaffected, and the prospect that one day I, too, could reach a point of dignified apathy reassured me. But now all that was ruined, and the officer’s message got through: my mother’s suffering was as ugly as my own, and there was no remedy for either of us. I could only put her to bed and let her work it out in private until she was finished. Grief was worse than death or crime. It was humiliation.

But Krystal wasn’t my mother and I wasn’t thirteen anymore, and since I had dedicated myself to my complete immersion in Three’s Company, I had a frank disinterest in whatever Krystal was going through, or how Geannie’s house figured into it. When she called me up again I’d hoped that she was over it, but when I went over to her place for our first regular Friday night dinner since our hiatus, I noticed for the first time that she had started losing weight. And she was sullen and pale, the picture of a suffering someone. Now, after almost five years, she was on some kind of grief kick? I didn’t comment. I watched her pick at her food as I swallowed my rage.