This was not the way anyone pictured two boys: one harboring another, collapsed and sobbing, Ronny cradling Ben, choking breaths that shook them both. He had waited a long time to do this. It would have been easy to state the obvious, to whisper comfort, but Ronny simply held him, head in his lap, shoulders rising up, like a little boy; they did talk, sporadically; I’m moving in with you, Ben said; Ronny said, Well, it’s not a lot of room; Ben: We don’t need a lot; Ronny leaning over to kiss Ben’s ear, and Ben sighing. The house had grown quiet. Next door there was murmuring as Sheila and Jamal talked, too muffled to distinguish. The two boys—they felt like boys today, both of them—simply waited. A radio sports show talking about the Duke game. Mentioning Ben’s name among the other seniors, talking about his pass deflection. In the afternoon they fell asleep, warm, tangled up with each other, still in their clothes. But still, in the end it was unfair, because they were not thinking only of Miss Dee, crying for Miss Dee, were they? There was so much more.

Minette

BY THE TIME SHE DIED THEY were to stand in a middle ground between family and acquaintance, not only with Miss Dee but with Minette and some of the people in the boardinghouse. The ordeal drew them into a temporary closeness. In the late afternoons the other tenants clustered in the living room, awkward, wondering whether she would come home: before the stroke one of them had seen Miss Dee in the kitchen, bewildered, pulling all the pots and pans out of cupboards and arranging them on the counter, sure that something was missing; one of them had found her at the back of the lot wandering in the overgrown shrubs; a Frisbee had nearly hit her in the head while the boys were gliding it to one another; she had been talking about her steam iron in the hallway, it was spitting and hissing and she was scared to use it. Ronny had never gotten to know them, they were a kind of amorphous organism, all of them together, standing and slouching and picking at their ears. Jamal and Sheila slowly circled each other on the pretext of concern for Miss Dee; maybe Ben did the same to Ronny, but on a deeper note, sounding the hollow cavern of the last few months.

Miss Dee came home in a few days. Minette took time off work, moved into the house and slept on a cot at the foot of the bed. She said she had a stroke, Miss Dee, and had to be watched, lying in the white light on the white sheets, marked out by her blemishes, by those limpid eyes, magnified by the lenses. Her face leaned into the light from the window, a liquid over her skin, a look of yearning in her eyes, as if she wanted to leave, to go up and out. There was something immensely precious in her that would be released. Wrapped up in sheets, trailing tubes. One visitor at a time. Ben made no fuss about going in, showed no special dread. This was after a night when he laid his head into Ronny’s lap and shook and sobbed out his breath and let the whole shuddering arc of grief pass through him, most of it for his mother, the ghost haunting him, passed out of the world forever. He let himself feel it, in Ronny’s lap in the dark. Every death echoed of every other. A deafening quiet in the house.