“I know,” she says, tiny from her bed against all the pillows. “I look terrible.”

“No you don’t.” I play with the car keys still in my hands.

“I love that you’re lying to me. Even though you promised you never would.”

“I’m not lying,” I lie again.

“You are—otherwise you’d look at me.”

I raise my eyes up. “Did I promise you that?”

“No. I was just trying to see if you were paying attention.”

My eyes fill with tears and I sit down on the edge of the bed. “I’m paying attention.”

She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “I know you are.”

We sit quietly for a few minutes, neither of us wanting to talk about the most obvious topic—the fact that she is truly in decline now; that her condition will not improve, or reverse itself, or stop. Until it stops. Even though I’ve known since the beginning that this terrible part was looming, I’m still shocked. Realizing that we’ve arrived at this final stage comes as a total body blow.

“We have to talk about this. We have to make a plan.” I can barely get the words out because I don’t want to talk about this and I don’t want to make a fucking plan.

“I know, but not now.”

I’m about to push her and say, When? If not now, then when? But before I can get my lips to move she deftly changes the subject.

“What’s bothering you besides me?”

I close my eyes. I want to say something; instead, I start to sob—a controlled heaving. But the last thing Glenn needs is for me to fall apart, so I quickly pull myself together and tell her that somebody’s been pooping at the school. On the floor in front of the middle school bathroom. I wipe my eyes and nose and take a deep breath. “They think it’s Teddy. And he’s getting so stressed about it that he’s starting to worry that he’s turning into Gary. Which he’s not, but still.”

“Fuckers,” Glenn manages to whisper.

I tell her about earlier, how we put the fear of God into Grace, how I think that took care of it. “But something’s not adding up,” I say, sitting up now. “How, with a classroom full of kids down the hall, does this Secret Pooper—that’s my nickname for him—manage to defecate onto the floor essentially on command—then leave as quickly and as quietly as he arrived? It seems impossible.” I look at her bedside table, all the pills lined up, all the half-finished glasses of water.

She rolls her eyes, readjusts the pillow behind her head. “You need to set up a remote camera. Catch them in the act.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

She closes her eyes. “Who cares. It’s your kid.”

“So if the Pooper isn’t pooping in real time,” I say, thinking out loud, “it means they’re doing it elsewhere and staging the scene at school. I think I saw something like this on Dateline once, only it wasn’t poop but some other kind of DNA, and it wasn’t a pooper, it was a killer.”