Buddy is furiously excited to stop at the cemetery. He’s behaving like a little kid being taken to the circus, jumping from front seat to back, making this little yipping noise that almost sounds like hiccups. This time, Ed parks the car just inside the flaking pillars and lets the dog out. As he has done before, Buddy courses up and down the driveway until he collapses in the shade of the car. Overprotective Alice would be royally pissed that the dog isn’t on a leash, but that’s their little secret. Buddy isn’t going anywhere.

Ed gets to work scraping the flaking paint from the left-hand column. He’ll give Buck Franklin a call tonight and let him know that if the cemetery commissioner won’t take care of this part of the cemetery, he’ll be losing Ed’s vote in November. The paint drifts down like lead-based snow, covering Ed’s shoes and his face. His bare forearms begin to speckle. He probably should have brought a mask.

The wire brush sings its own song against the rough brick. Stacystacystacy, it whispers.

When Stacy was born, a seven-pound-four-ounce beautiful baby girl, he dreamed of those iconic father-of-a-daughter moments, teaching her to drive and walking her down the aisle. But as she grew up, he found that he got to do those things he might have expected with a son. He taught her to throw a knuckle ball, dribble a basketball, understand football strategies; how to kick a soccer ball.

*   *   *

“Did you have tryouts today?” Ed has seen the high school athletic department’s announcement on the marquee, donated by the class of 1975, for fall sports tryouts. Stacy had been the high-point earner on her middle school soccer team, playing forward, and everyone assumes she’ll be a shoo-in for the JV team now that she’s in high school.

Stacy is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, no sign of the soccer clothes that she lived in for most of middle school.

“I forgot.” Stacy ladles a spoonful of chili out of the simmering pot on the stove. Alice is in the laundry room, and Ed can hear the bang, bang, bang of a sneaker in the dryer.

“How could you forget?”

“I just did. No big deal.”

“Can you try out later?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You don’t sound like this is important to you? Don’t you care?”

Stacy licks the back of the spoon, focusing on anything but looking him in the eye. “I guess so.”

“You guess you care? If you don’t want to play, that’s fine; just don’t ‘forget’ to try out.”

“I just did. People forget things. It’s, like, not the end of the world.”