“And your dad? Were they still married?”

Josie nodded.

“It’s good your father has you,” the woman continued.

Josie tried a smile, and the woman reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Are you staying long?”

The woman’s daughter had begun to sing, and Josie looked at her watch. “Just for the funeral.”

She was dreading the funeral. Not so much the service itself—the loving eulogy and endless hugs from her mother’s wide circle of friends—but the physical viewing of her mother. She knew she would break at the sight, snap wide open, both sides of her body pulled apart. No matter how many strained memories of their relationship she held in her head, seeing her mother’s body was sure to make her crack. It had happened even when her mother was alive. Whatever icy exterior Josie managed to fabricate, the fact was that her insides clawed and scrabbled and begged for any piece of her mother. And now that her mother was dead, now that there was no chance of ever climbing into her mother’s heart, Josie was afraid of what would expose itself if she split in two.

The irony of the last few days did not escape her either. Although her father hadn’t told her exactly what time her mother had died, Josie knew it had happened the day before Halloween in the early evening, and Josie knew what she had been doing in the early evening—nearly beating Tyler. Karma, she told herself. The more she thought about it, the more her guilt piled up like a towering stack of baby blocks.

According to Josie’s father, her mother had gone to the doctor for a checkup—for the preceding two weeks she had been sluggish and her arms had been tingly. The doctor did a series of tests and told her she had heart disease, told her to quit smoking, and gave her a prescription. After the appointment, she had filled the prescription, and as she was pulling out of the pharmacy parking lot, the pain struck. She managed to pull the car to the side of the road, but soon after, the attack gripped her. She had even tried to get to the pills, managed to get the safety top off, but her heart had given out just outside the pharmacy, the bright yellow pills dotting her thighs like happy suns. And the worst part, her father told her, was there were no cigarettes in her purse. “No cigarettes, Jojo.”

“You’ll get through it,” the woman said.