I met Charlene before Luke was born. More than a quarter of a century ago. She and I dated the same man, but rather than fight over him, we dumped him and started hanging out together. I got her a job at the Gandy Dancer restaurant where I was working. Then she met Luke’s father and moved to California. Divorced him and married Adam’s father. After Adam’s father beat her, she returned with Adam and Luke. Adam is the same age as Sky. For two years, we lived together, pooling our resources and babysitting each other’s kids. We both entered school; Charlene became a nurse, and I, with my degree in marketing, am the first person in my family to graduate with a four-year degree. She is Sky’s second mother, I am Adam and Luke’s second mother. Diane came with Charlene’s third marriage, and a move across the state for her husband’s job. But that one didn’t work out, either, and she divorced for the third time. It’s fast telling this, but it wasn’t fast living it. In the telling, I can sum up a decade and a half in two sentences.

“Why do you have to marry them? Why don’t you just live with them?”

“I do live with them. Then I marry them. It seems wrong to live with a man unmarried when there’re children in the house.”

“You’re too beautiful for your own good,” I told her then. Charlene has perfect features, Grace Kelly or Diane Lane with a toned body. No matter what she wears, she looks elegant with an extra flair, even now, even in the midst of tragedy, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt with her denim jacket. Yet she’s unaware of her beauty. She wears it with no manipulation, no desire for gain. No flashy makeup. No sexy come-hither looks or coy batting of eyelashes. And men, who might shy away from a woman who’s so beautiful, instead make passes at her. She piques their curiosity and then their lust, a lust that’s founded more on the appreciation of the subtle than the blatant.

“I stupidly think that love solves all. Think I woulda learned different after Adam’s father.”

* * *

THEN LUKE DIED.

This is what happened: