She came and sat on my bed. She said, “Baby boy, you’ve got to be patient.” She stroked my hair and I said, “I can’t move anything but my mouth,” and she said, “God knows you’ve still got that left.” She rubbed my whole body, starting with my feet. Her fingers were something I could feel. My parts were all deadweight on the bed, beyond my reach, but they weren’t gone yet—I couldn’t feel them but I could feel her palms on them.

She said, “It’s okay to lie still in the dark and let another person take care of you.” Then I asked it and I don’t know why I did. I heard the question like it came from somewhere else, another body with all the parts moving, saying, “Is that love or something? Someone taking care of you in the dark?” She said, “It’s not love. But I wish it could be.”

He paused. “That’s all I wrote.”

“She would have loved that,” I said.

“She loved everything about me.” There was sadness in his voice, and pride. “Do you believe it? That one moment can stick around through all the other bullshit?”

“Actually,” I said, “I do.”

He used a pocketknife to slice the tape along the seams of the box. He had to keep his foot on the edge to hold it down as he pulled out the jar.

“Hold this?” He handed it to me. “It’s heavier than it looks.”

It was. And cold. I held it steady while Abe screwed the top off the jar and reached in with the scoop. He swung his arm in one long arc, throwing a gray trail into the pale sky toward the darker mountains. The breeze kicked up and blew the dust back onto his knuckles. It gathered in the wrinkles of his sleeves. “It’s incredible,” he said. “She used to be a woman.”

It’s only the body that goes, my mother had said. But the body is so much.

We left our jar on the cracked ground. It wasn’t tall, but it was the tallest thing we could see. There were still some ashes left inside. We knew the wind would get them, too.

At the motel we ordered Chinese. I overate and then my stomach cramped. We’d gotten separate rooms but it felt too lonely to use them both. I was afraid of the quiet. I ate my fortune cookie without reading the slip. We turned on the TV and watched a show about dinosaurs. When we turned it off, the screen crackled with static before it went black. We could see our faces, side by side and tired. I wanted grief to fill every part of me but it didn’t, only struck me dumb whenever I tried to turn away from it.

“You can sleep here if you want to,” I told him. “I want you to.”

He unbuckled his belt. “I can’t sleep in my pants,” he said. “But you already knew that.”