The tour was a mistake—too much, too soon. My immediate bosses in the supervision office also don’t seem too thrilled with these behind-the-scenes revelations about Keith’s distribution. It wouldn’t be in the interest of the Keith Fulfillment Center for Keith with a mole to get ideas. “Time to turn in your Keith,” they apprise me over the phone. I reply that they cannot have him. Don’t fret, they say; they’re not harvesting Keith with a mole, they’re just going to knock him out with a new cocktail until they have a better plan to integrate rogue Keiths into society. Of course, I persevere in my refusal, but it’s irrelevant, as Keith is depressed. He sheds the little weight he’s managed to put on since he woke, and he won’t depart my bed. “Sleep,” he pleads one day. “Sleep with the Keiths.” His features are stricken when I laugh, and I feel sorry that Keith isn’t sophisticated enough to delight in entendre. What releases me from my commitment to keep him is picturing Keith spending the rest of his life alone and dreamless.

“Don’t remember your husband at his weakest, remember him at his strongest” was the unsolicited and offensively sympathetic advice that went around with the flu at my husband’s funeral. Recommending that I forget my husband’s illness is like saying, “Don’t think of an elephant,” an elephant that is also a grave. Prior to the notices from collection agencies, then the follow-ups to the notices, then the follow-ups to the follow-ups to the notices, we went to a nice restaurant. A woman was there eating a steak, accompanied by a boy who ran around and screamed. As the boy passed us, my husband interrupted him to ask, “What’s your best memory?” My husband assumed, as did I, that this woman was in a crisis she was dealing with as politely as possible. “The necklace!” the boy shouted and resumed screaming. In between screams, the boy had been sucking on a necklace, and when it dropped from his mouth, I couldn’t settle on its shape. It was slippery as viscera, umbilical. “He’s not mine,” the woman said, intuiting our curiosity. Our waiter brought us steaks. “I’m chaperoning him for my sister’s ex.”

The sister is dead, I later told my husband. You don’t know that, he reasoned, the sister could be with her current spouse. We brought my husband’s steak home because he wasn’t able to finish it, and it rotted. When we moved into our house, I asked him, “How much happiness will we get to have here?” He teased me about it from time to time, saying, “Rate your happiness today on a scale from one to ten.” As his illness progressed, he had to rate his pain on a scale from one to ten. I didn’t ask about happiness when we moved again. I also didn’t ask if pain and happiness were on a continuum, with pain in negative numbers and happiness in positive, or if it diminished both pain and happiness to have them on the same scale. Why the boy in the restaurant was so connected to that necklace I don’t know, and naturally I don’t know what happened to him after we paid our bill. That’s how it is supposed to be with children, even when they’re not yours; they outlast their elders, if everything goes right, and their destiny is a mystery. But that doesn’t feel right to me—if you create it, you should be there when it is destroyed, to be a palm on the forehead.