You have to understand, I was a kid who was pretty good at keeping quiet. I took care of stuff on my own. I didn’t shout about what I needed. I did it for myself. But that night I really thought I was dying. I thought maybe somebody snipped something in my spine or my brain and now my body couldn’t talk to itself anymore.

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.