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for all I know.”
    “Right,” I say, feeling sure that April will get to the bottom of things soon.
    She continues, as if reading my mind. “I don’t want to get overly involved, but I am involved . . . You know, as Romy’s friend and a mother at the school. . . And, in a way, as a friend of yours and Nick’s. Jeez, I can’t believe what a small world it is. . .”
    “Yeah,” I say, returning to the kitchen for a much-needed sip of wine.
    “So anyway,” April says, her tone lightening suddenly, dramatically. “Do you need help with those skewers? Just went shopping and our fruit bowl is bountiful—I could run some over?”
    “Thanks,” I say. “But too much effort. I think I’ll just pick something up in the morning.”
    “You sure?” she asks.
    “I’m sure,” I say.
    “Okay,” April says. “But no Oreos.”
    “No Oreos,” I repeat, wondering how I could have been so stressed, even for a moment, about something as trivial as a preschool snack.
    6
    Valerie
    The view outside Charlie’s third floor room at Shriners is a pleasant one, overlooking a courtyard planted with pink and white hydrangeas, but Valerie prefers to keep the blinds drawn, the thin northern exposure allowing virtually no light to work its way through the plastic slats. As a result, she quickly loses track of day and night, in a way that is a bittersweet reminder of Charlie’s infancy, when all she wanted to do was be near him and take care of his every need. But now, she can only watch helplessly as he endures dressing changes while bags of fluids drip nutrients, electrolytes, and painkillers into his veins. The hours pass by slowly, punctuated only by Dr. Russo’s twice-daily rounds and the endless cycle of nurses, social workers, and hospital staff, most of whom come for Charlie, a few to check on her, some simply to empty the wastebaskets, bring meals, or mop the floors.
    Valerie refuses to sleep on the stainless-steel cot that one of the many nameless, faceless nurses wheeled in for her, its pilled white sheets and thin blue blanket stretched and neatly tucked into the sides. Instead, she stays put on the wooden rocker near Charlie’s bed, where she watches his narrow chest rising and falling, the flutter of his eyelids, the smile that sometimes appears in his sleep. Every once in a while, despite her best efforts to stay alert, she dozes for a few minutes, sometimes longer, always awaking with a start, reliving the call from Romy, realizing once again that her nightmare is real. Charlie is still too drugged to fully understand what has happened, and Valerie both dreads and prays for the moment she will explain everything to him.
    On the fourth or fifth day, Valerie’s mother, Rosemary, returns from Sarasota where she had been visiting her cousin. It is another moment Valerie has been dreading, feeling irrationally guilty for cutting her mother’s visit short when she almost never gets out of Southbridge, and guiltier still for adding another tragic chapter to her already tragic life. Widowed twice over, Rosemary lost both husbands—Valerie’s father and the salesman who followed—to heart attacks.
    Valerie’s father had been shoveling the driveway after a particularly large snowfall (stubbornly refusing to pay the teenaged boy next door for something he could do himself) when he collapsed. And although it was never confirmed, Valerie was pretty sure her mother’s second husband died while the two were having sex. During the funeral, Jason had leaned over to Valerie and opined about the number of Hail Marys it would require to pay for the sin of nonprocreative, lethal carnal relations.
    It is one of the many things Valerie loves most about her brother—his ability to make her laugh in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Even now, he attempts casual one-liners, often at the expense of the more zealous or chatty nurses, and Valerie forces a smile as a way of thanking her brother for his effort, for always being there for