Anyway, this explains why cremated six-foot-tall people fit into an urn the size of a genie lamp. There isn’t much left. And if you touch the stuff—which, yes, I have—it’s not like the fine powder you shovel out of your fireplace but closer to the texture of sand.

“Earth to Margaret,” Mom said.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking images of incinerated dogs from my mind.

She nodded to the waitress hovering over our table—a young, tired-looking woman whom I thought I recognized as having been a senior when I was a freshman. Her name tag said D’Arcy. Right. She aimed a patient smile my way, her pen poised over her little notepad.

“California omelet, please,” I said. “And coffee.”

“We don’t have avocados,” D’Arcy said in a monotone. “We’ve got them ordered, but all the trucks have to go through the military now.”

“Okay. How about just whatever kind of veggie omelet you can make?”

“Will do,” she said, and left us to return a moment later to fill our coffee mugs. I added two creams and poured in a quick stream of white sugar from the glass container on the table.

“Where are you this morning?” Mom asked. “You’ve been in la-la land since you woke up.”

“La-la land is Los Angeles,” I replied. “I haven’t been in Los Angeles.”

She glared at me.

“I was up at four in the morning, you know,” I added.

“I told you to go back to bed. I could’ve handled the dogs on my own.”

“It’s Nerf,” I said. “I wanted to be here.”

“Do you want to keep him? They’re going to mix the ashes.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine that having a jar of Nerf-and-other-dog sand on my bookshelf would comfort me much.

“Are you doing all right otherwise?” Mom asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, though I should have said that I had a lump in my breast and something weird in my shoulder and that I was terrified. I couldn’t do it.

“What are you not telling me?” she said, sipping her coffee, which she drank black.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Is it about a boy?”

“What?” I laughed. “No. This is the farthest thing from being about a boy.” I mean, there was a boy who I was hoping would make a move already, but those thoughts were relatively fun.

“So there’s something.”

“Maybe I’m just not adjusting well to being home.”

“If that were the problem, then you wouldn’t have refused to tell me,” Mom said.

“Wait,” I said. “If I don’t answer, I’m hiding something, and if I do, that’s evidence that I’m lying?” I lifted my coffee cup and held it in my hands, which always seem to be cold.

“I know you, Maggie. I know that if you’re hiding something, it’ll be significant. You’d been begging to come home since we left, so, no, that’s not it.”

I took a long, slow sip.

“Okay, I’ll guess,” Mom said. “You’re upset we can’t leave. You’ve turned into one of those teenage political activists, and you want to tell me how unconstitutional it is.”