Tara had always been passionate about music. It was as though she took Stephen’s unrealized dream—to be a rock star—and made it hers. Whether it was his genetics or encouragement or an x factor in her, her zeal for music and a preternatural dedication to it were apparent when she was a toddler. “Doesn’t this sound like rain, Mommy?” She played two notes on a toy xylophone very softly. By the time she was six, she made up melodies copying a bird’s song, her dangling feet unable to reach the pedals of the piano.

So Aaron came along and they wrapped each other in the same dream. And then he was out and living in Detroit with his family and they saw each other whenever they could get the time, a car, and the gas money for the trip.

“So what was he in for, anyway?”

“It’s a crazy story, Mom.” Tara avoided my eyes.

“I’ll listen as long as it takes.” I closed the novel I’d been reading.

Tara sat across from me and pleated the crease in her jeans, the blue chunks in her hair iridescent.

I waited.

“You can ask Special, you know, he’ll tell you. He’s not a closed person. He talks about stuff.” Tara’s fingertips pressed her jeans as though smoothing out my concerns.

“You’re here. You tell me.”

“Well, like, he and some friends stopped to get pizza. He was sitting in the backseat of the car, didn’t even go into the pizza place. He’s not sure if it, like, was spur of the moment or if his friends planned the robbery of the pizza place from the beginning. An off-duty cop was picking up a pizza for his family. He pulled out his gun and arrested them. Saw Aaron in the backseat of the car and arrested him, too.”

“He was guilty by association?”

Tara looked beyond me. “Aaron had five dime bags of weed on him that he got as a deal for thirty bucks.”

“He got time for that? For thirty bucks of pot?”

“Essentially. And being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I squinted at her. There was something more here. “Was he going to sell it? Was that the deal?”

Tara shrugged.

“He’s a small-time dealer?”

“That was then.”

“Is he?”

“No.”

“Was he then?”

She shook her head.

“Harv and Kim’s kid, what’s her name?”

“Katie …”

“Got probation and community service for a lot more pot than that. What did she have? A quarter ounce. Is that the whole story? Had he already been in trouble?”

“Nope. First arrest. But, Mom.” Tara’s voice had an exasperated tone, as if she were the adult and I was the teenager. “Katie’s white and had a lawyer. Katie lives in Ann Arbor, not Detroit.”