“Was he doing heroin up there?” I asked.

“Here? No, never. Not in a million years. I swear on my mother’s grave, Lucas. We were done with that shit. I mean, grass? Sure. But no more smack. Man, I’m telling you, I was totally blown away when I heard it was smack. But you saw how it was at the festival. All the dope that was around. And all that craziness. Best I can figure is it was just once for old times’ sake. It’s fucked up, man, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

We hung up. Zach’s surprise when I asked if Barry’d been doing heroin at the farm sounded genuine. Besides, I’d seen my cousin when he was doing heavy drugs, and he didn’t act or look anything like the Barry I’d hung with at the festival. In a way it makes his story even sadder. He’d climbed out of the darkness. Finally gotten out of the house. Started creating art. And then . . . one small but horribly lethal mistake.

The casket is lowered into the open grave, part of a family plot I didn’t know about. How can one person know so little about his own family? Is it because such things aren’t spoken about until there’s a reason? But there was a reason. In the ground a few inches from my shoes is a small footstone:

The funeral ends. Friends help Aunt Jane and Uncle Phillip to a car. Soon the only ones left are my family and some funeral workers in overalls waiting nearby. I catch the paterfamilias’s eye and look down at Brett’s footstone. The paterfamilias winces. He doesn’t want to deal with this right now. He’s been dealing with it for nearly sixteen years.

He puts an arm around my brother’s shoulders and leads him toward the car. Yesterday, I volunteered to drive up to the camp and get Alan, but the paterfamilias said he wanted to do it.

The hot, dry wind whisks more dust off the pile of dirt. My stomach growls angrily. I feel sluggish, light-headed, and mildly nauseated from hunger. It’s a hell of a lot harder to starve myself than I had imagined. (Forget the finger; maybe I should just chop off the whole fucking arm. That’ll help me lose weight.)

Mom steps beside me, looks down at the footstone.

“Why don’t we ever talk about him?” I ask.

“What’s there to say, Lucas?” She lifts her chin and has the impassive look of someone who for a long time has been trying to get past tears.

“Barry told me that you took him out in the cold. But that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with him getting sick, right?”

Mom slides her arm through mine as if she needs to keep me close. “But it might have.”