She put everything into her practice, hopeful that something, anything could help her work through the grief she felt over her parents and her confusion about what she should do next with her own life.

After one class, the instructor walked up to Poppy and said, “I know I tell you to open your ribs, but you need to keep them a little tighter. I can see you give too much of yourself away in your poses. Careful, or you’ll end up empty.” Poppy broke into tears and never went back.

One day, almost three weeks since her return to Milwaukee, she was doing yoga alone in the living room, surrounded by piles of books and her parents’ worn Scandinavian-style furniture, working on poses that were supposed to help with depression. She tried to quiet her mind and rebalance her sympathetic nervous system. Nothing worked. She’d listen to Habib Koité, do a hundred sun salutations, and go into wheel pose, only to collapse on the floor. She screamed out loud to the ceiling and whatever higher power was above it, “I’m opening my fucking heart and it’s not helping!”

That was when she met Brad. He was standing in the entrance to the living room holding two beers. “Maybe this’ll help?”

“Yeah,” she said, embarrassed. A beer sounded perfect, almost as perfect as the hard stuff she’d sworn off a few years ago.

“Brad Sobatka. You don’t remember me, do you?”

Brad Sobatka, Brad Sobatka. She studied his face, his cropped copper hair. Nothing clicked. “I don’t. I’m sorry, I’ve been gone a long time.”

“We were at Riverside together. I was in your class.”

“I’m surprised I don’t recognize you. You’re so good-looking.” She wasn’t flirting. He was good-looking, even if he wasn’t the kind of guy she was usually drawn to. His hair was beginning to recede, and he didn’t have a surfer’s lithe, athletic frame. Brad was more a part of the land. He was tall but stout, a little thick in his neck and gut. His nose was straight and blunt, and his chin and jaw were covered in coppery razor stubble. He had perfect teeth.

He held up the stiff fabric of his heavy twill work pants to reveal the rubber lift on his big, black shitkicker of a shoe. “I have a club foot. Kids could be pretty brutal about it. By the time I got to high school I learned how to make myself invisible. That’s probably why you don’t remember me. I was that guy in the back row.”

“High school was a long time ago, and my last year there was, you know, a bit of a blur.”

“You partook,” he said, pretending he was inhaling a joint.

Poppy smiled. “Yes. I partook.”