Her words hang in the hot summer air.

“We’ll never know,” she adds.

It was almost sixteen years ago. She’s still going to that shrink in the city. What a thing to have to live with.

I wipe my face with a bandanna, feeling the windblown grit that’s collected on my forehead. Stomach growls again. It’s been three days of sheer agony. I don’t know how I’m going to get through another week of this.

I’m ready to go home. There’s too much sadness here. Barry, Brett. But Mom holds my arm tight. “If it hadn’t been for you and Alan, I don’t know how I would have survived.” It feels like she’s relieved to be able to tell me. As if she’s been waiting a long time.

“Mom, can I ask you a question?”

“I wish you would.”

“Do you . . . think this has something to do with the way Dad’s been all this time?”

She squeezes my arm and looks down at the footstone again. “I think he tried to accept what happened. I think he really tried not to blame me. But he wasn’t able to do it. I tried so many times to get him to talk. If not to me, then to a therapist. He went a few times, and then . . .” She shakes her head and trails off.

“And then you had Alan.”

Shovels scrape and clatter as the cemetery men start to scoop the remaining dirt back into Barry’s grave. Mom sniffs, wipes a tear away. I can’t recall ever seeing her cry before. Her grip on my arm stays tight, but her voice quavers. “We’ll never know who Brett was, or what he might have become. It’s so easy to project on him all the hopes and dreams you have for a child. To imagine he would have been everything you could have wished for. I think that’s what your father’s done. He’s never been able to let go of what might have been. Brett, not Alan. He can’t help himself.”

And Antonia has two young sons who need a father. Somewhere in Dad’s head, does he think it’s a do-over?

The cemetery men shovel with short, efficient strokes. Each scoop of dirt that lands with a soft thump on Barry’s casket is another reminder of how real, how horribly irreversible, what’s happened is. Mom wipes away another tear. I slide my arm out of hers and put it around her shoulders. “I love you, Mom.”

“Thank you, Lucas. And, of course, I love you.”

We walk back to the car, where the paterfamilias and Alan are waiting. I get in the back with Alan. No one speaks during the drive to Barry’s house. No one spoke during the drive to the cemetery, either.