When his mother was still alive, she couldn’t stand the bike. She couldn’t stand seeing any of Philip’s things, and it was the only fight they ever had. Silas hated how she changed Philip’s room into an art studio just a few weeks after he died, as if his grunge posters and blackout shades had never existed. As if he had never slept there until well past noon, awaking only to Silas’s persistent knocking, begging him to come outside and throw the ball or take him for a ride. His mother wouldn’t talk about it, but Silas watched her face enough to know it wasn’t just sadness that kept Philip’s name, his memory, at bay.

She was enraged.

Whether with Philip himself or with the lifetime of choices and fate that put him there that night—the weather, the traffic, the high school she enrolled both her boys in that promised skills for a successful future—Silas didn’t know. He had often wondered if the rage was meant for him, for throwing the party in the first place. If she couldn’t look at Philip’s things without hating her one surviving son. It wasn’t until he found himself a parent of a teenage boy who favored few words and closed doors that he realized the truth. She was enraged with herself. But by then, she was gone, too, the death certificate saying ovarian cancer but Silas knowing it was the rage that killed her: she grew those tumors like teeth to eat herself alive.

The girls’ voices shot out beyond the trees before their bodies did.

“That’s not fair; you ran cross-country!”

“Nobody likes a sore loser, Mick!”

Silas stood up and walked to the edge of the porch.

He watched Ruth fall against the biggest oak tree in the yard, her outstretched hand making contact first and the rest of her body following, eager and panting. She wore a white bathing suit, the kind that ended in bows on each hip and had one in the middle of the chest. Her skin was lighter than his daughter’s, pale like that of the good girls asleep in fairy tales. Her auburn hair was wet and darker for it, stuck against her neck as she caught her breath. She didn’t have any shoes, and she kicked up one leg to inspect the sole of her foot, twisting her body effortlessly. Everything about her was spun long and lovely, and so very new.

“You should know, Ruth, we’ve never taught Mickey how to lose with grace. Parental oversight,” Silas said. Mickey stumbled out of the tree line, her cheeks red.

“Shut up, Dad.”

Ruth turned to the porch where Silas stood and, holding the tree with one palm, gave him a deep curtsy. “I’m honored to be the one to teach her this lesson, Mr. Harrison.”

Silas chuckled and leaned his hips against the railing.