Mercifully, a few heads nodded, as if I had said something very important. I knew I hadn’t. I had nothing to say. But that wasn’t true. I did – just not to these people. If it’d just been me talking into a void, oh, I would’ve had all kinds of things to say. I would have told the void the one where I’m six, and Dad and I are hiking at the River Styx, the place where I learned to love the world just as much as he did, and we’re on the secluded path that runs parallel to the stream, and I go to explore by the swampy pools along the riverbank – looking for tadpoles, or something – and my feet have already disappeared up to my ankles by the time I realize I’m sinking. But Dad hauls me out by my arms, the mud sucking and popping beneath me like I’m a loose tooth. We wash our feet in the stream, watch the mud get swept away with the current, and Dad says he didn’t think that anyone has ever been so calm in quicksand. I could have told the one where I’m eight and he lets me watch episodes of The Twilight Zone with him after Mom goes to sleep; where I’m eleven and we ride the bumper cars at the county carnival over and over even though he has a bad back; where I’m fourteen and he holds me after the girl breaks my heart; where I’m seventeen and he’s sitting in a box to my right and everyone is expecting something of me, and I can’t stand it, I really can’t, because he shouldn’t be dead.

He shouldn’t be dead.

I fiddled with the microphone stand, my fingers slipping. ‘But why doesn’t anybody know what happened? The … the car people. The coroner. Whatever. This sort of thing can’t just happen.’

At this point, the audience were still on my side – besides Mom, whose spine had got noticeably straighter. They were waiting for me to throw in the twist, the but, to share some glorious epiphany about how that was just the way the world is, that sometimes we don’t have all the answers, that life is unfair.

‘Dad did care about people. But, I don’t know. Maybe people didn’t extend that same care to him.’

Mom mouthed my name.

‘He was told people’s most personal stuff on a daily basis. Secrets upon secrets. Dark stuff. And maybe …’

At first, I thought maybe I’d been in a highly suggestive state and was experiencing grief-induced hallucinations, because I could have sworn that, near the back of the room, was the homecoming queen.