For five days. Until it was apparent that the Luke in the hospital bed was his empty shell and that his spirit was gone.

“He’s with me,” Charlene whispered. “Just like he promised, I feel him.”

Sky came for the funeral, another funeral too soon after her baby’s death. Here we were, middle-aged and dealing with wrong deaths. It should be our parents, Charlene’s mom was still alive, older friends. Not our children. Not our grandchildren. The world had turned upside down.

Charlene told me a month or so after Luke’s death that she went to the site. She went on a Sunday when no one would be there. Luke’s love for the outdoors was one of the reasons he became an ironworker. She had to see his last view. The day she went was one of those sunny June days with the birds madly singing and the air warm and moist, but not yet the sticky heat of full-blown summer. She dragged a ladder up the stairs to the floor he had been working on and propped it against the steel. The height, the still naked sides of the building, made her dizzy. But she didn’t care that much if she fell. She inhaled and closed her eyes. Her fear was swamped by her drive to be with him, to experience his last moments as though he would not have endured them alone and they would be together.

The second step from the top, she had purchased his view. She was where he was when he hung impaled on the rod. A field stretched toward trees off in the distance. A breeze ruffled the grass. A few innocent daisies nodded their heads. He had seen a fresh field rather than the skeleton of the building he was erecting. You saw God’s hand on the earth, she thought as she climbed down the ladder, acknowledging whatever spirit of Luke still floated among the rods he had affixed, the scaffolding he had climbed, the ledge he had sat on to eat lunch.

She returned to her car.

That was seven months ago. Now we’re in my kitchen and the Christmas cookie club will start in five hours. “What kind of cookies did you make?”

“Those chocolate truffle things. I didn’t want to try a new recipe.”

“Everyone loves them.”

“I couldn’t miss the party, I’d lose my spot.”

“You’re one of the original members. I’d make your cookies and pretend they’re yours.”

“I’m trying to just move through my life as though it’s normal. Like it used to be.”

“How is Adam? And Diane?”

“Diane’s busy being a teenage girl as though that would make everything okay again. And Adam?” She purses her lips together. “He’s less depressed. He finally got a job training horses.”

“You hungry? Want something before we go shopping?”