We go to his favorite coffee spot in City Park more than once. When we can’t find something else to do, we hang out at the park near our favorite bridge and just talk. We circle the family stuff, focusing instead on the chance to get to know one another. It’s nice to talk about other things. I learn that Daniel hates tomatoes but loves ketchup, which I tell him makes no sense. I learn that he won his third-grade spelling bee but got bullied for it so much that he deliberately threw the next one in fourth grade. He spelled laughter with an f. Even his teacher knew what he was up to. I learn that he loves the Avengers movies and Lizzo and—secretly—girls with tattoos, and that he has had six girlfriends since the ninth grade.

In exchange, I tell him about my passion for breakfast cereals and true crime shows and nineties music—can you really top a decade that gave us a girl band like the Breeders? I don’t think so. I regale him with Moony stories, like the time she told off the police officer who pulled us over for not having been to mass in over a month. The poor guy was so shaken he forgot to write our ticket. I show him pictures on my phone of Deena, the cockapoo next door, and Moony standing over a pot of homecooked chicken and dumplings in the kitchen, a wooden spoon in one hand. But today, I’ve saved the best for last. Today, I brought my sketchbook to show him.

He flips through the first few pages tenderly, like a librarian handling an archived text from centuries ago.

I bite back a laugh. “You can handle it like regular paper. It’s not that fragile.”

Daniel grins but doesn’t take his eyes off the page. “I don’t want to smudge anything.”

There are sketches of all kinds of random things. A hibiscus bloom. Moony’s favorite coffee mug. The old Cadillac owned by Mr. Whitley from down the street. Rain over the tree line at the end of Sawmill Road. There are sketches of people, too. Some of Moony. Some of me. A couple of my mother done from memory or pictures I dug out of Moony’s desk. One of our neighbor Eric. One of Father Fontenot. Two of Janice Brune, my closest friend until she moved away three years ago. And all the new ones from the Quarter.

Daniel pauses on a self-portrait. In it, I am looking over my shoulder at an imaginary horizon. My hair is spiked with lilac highlights and my eyes are soft, almost sleepy. “This is you?”

I nod, suddenly feeling all too exposed, like those dreams where you look down and realize you’re nude.