Later, when we’re gabbing in her kitchen over a piece of chocolate cake I just know will give me indigestion, Stuart emerges and rubs his skinny little body against my leg. I can feel his ribs ripple along my calf. He’s inky black except for a white muzzle and three out of four white feet. He has too many toes on each paw and a cauliflower ear. He’s not pretty.

“I didn’t take you for a cat person.”

“I’m not,” she says, reaching down and swishing her fingers together. He runs to her and rubs his face into the side of her hand. “I’m getting lonely in my old age, I guess.” She smiles this sad, tired smile.

And something about all of it just makes me fall apart—Margo being so lonely that she has to get an ugly little cat, and my father dying, and the fact that all I can picture is some bones on a hospital bed in the shape of him, hooked up to machines like the ones that flashed and beeped while Matty was in a coma on All My Days. Something about the whole thing makes me so sad that I can’t even stand it. “What kind of a person am I that I wasn’t even here?” I say. “I should have driven faster.”

“Sweetie,” Margo says, handing me a napkin, “you know I’ve done my best to never say a bad thing about your father. You search back and think on what I’ve said and you’ll be hard-pressed to find many ill-meaning words.” She sighs. “I did that for you and I thought I was doing the best I could. But not now when you’re beating yourself up. He made this choice. He chose not to get treatment and push everyone away. He made the choice to not go after you when you left.”

“Gary told him not to,” I say. “I begged you, so you got Gary to tell him to let me go. It was me. He was just doing what I wanted.”

Margo takes a deep breath and presses her lips together, like she’s holding back her words until they get in line. “When Gary went to talk to him that time, it wasn’t so he’d give you the car. It was to make him come get you. Gary told him that no man lets a little girl go out on her own like that. No man lets his responsibilities pass him by. That’s what really happened.”

I feel the same drop in my stomach and flush in my veins that I get when I’m driving away and realize I’ve left something behind. Margo pulls another napkin from the holder on the table and gives it to me. Mine is soaked already.