“And she’s in a relationship with Mike Lyle, I understand? How is that going?”

“Well, he’s actually really crude and—”

She swallows her bite of sandwich and holds up her hand. “I just think we should be really careful not to project your own cultural expectations. Mike, and also Melody, haven’t been exposed to—well, let’s call it the finer things in life. They do the best they can with what they have.”

So I leave out the Mike Lyle part. I leave out Bo. I don’t mention Two by Four. I tell it like it was a big, inconsequential adventure, and by the end of the story, that’s what it is. I might as well have gone to Disney World. “Except that halfway across the country, Grimshaw got mad at me, and now she won’t speak to me,” I finish.

“Oh, that won’t last,” Mom says.

She tells me a story about her best friend Judy, whom I’ve never heard of, about how they were roommates in grad school and then had a falling-out over a misunderstanding and how devastated she was. And how she spent years trying to patch things up and then finally Judy had a baby and ever since then they’ve exchanged Christmas cards.

“So things have a way of working themselves out for the best, honey.” She squeezes my hand. “Never underestimate the healing power of time.”

Honey? Since when have I been “honey”? I look at her closely. She’s on something. She starts telling me that when she was young she had no role models, and so she learned to have faith in life, that life itself was her greatest teacher, and to learn from it sometimes you just have to live in the world on the world’s terms, and that’s what I was doing, and while I was gone, she kept having to decide to live in faith rather than fear, and she thanked me for that opportunity to reaffirm the power of prayer.

“Well,” she says brightly. “I have an appointment at three with the superintendent. Oh—Allegra’s home! For a week. It was a total surprise.” She tells me the school year ended early and she came home with a friend.

“They got here a few nights ago.”

When I get home, the first thing I see is my bike. It seems like the most natural thing in the world to swing a leg over it and ride to the cemetery, where Grimshaw will be waiting for me, except I know that she won’t. An icy feeling clamps on to the small of my back. For the first time, it occurs to me that I might have done something very wrong. Not the kind of wrong you can apologize for, but a permanent wrong, an irrevocable wrong, a wrong someone doesn’t have to forgive you for. An adult wrong. The feeling follows me into the house and upstairs to the portico roof, where I find Allegra and her friend Robyn and Nora sipping what looks like minted sun tea out of a mayonnaise jar. When I climb through the window, Allegra sits up and shades her eyes.