I slide the rental car into a spot marked VISITOR, and then I sit in the driver’s seat for a moment. Then another one, looking out over the suburban low, flat, sprawling houses, the over-green lawns, the palms trees standing bolt upright at regular intervals. There’s even a golf course just out of sight, all this green and pleasant in a way that the dusty valley floor probably shouldn’t be.

We’re twenty miles from where I grew up, but now I’m in a different world.

I take a deep breath. I rub my eyes, my eyelids like sandpaper against them. I did manage to shower this morning in my hotel room, even if I didn’t really sleep last night either thanks to the gnawing ache in my chest.

Eli’s gone. He’s gone. Not just in prison, but really gone.

I open the car door into the heat before I can talk myself out of it, get out, and walk toward Sunset Acres Assisted Living. Like everything else here, in the nice part of Bakersfield, it’s a low, sprawling building with lush green lawns, palm trees, and a Spanish tile roof. I put her in here after we first made it big, before I even bought myself a house.

Anything to get her out of the leaking, rotting trailer where she was living alone.

I check in at the front desk, grab a nametag, and the receptionist calls my mom’s nurse that day. She’s a short Filipina woman named Isabel, and I’ve already told her everything.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, when she first sees me.

“Thanks,” I say automatically. “How’s she doing?”

My mom doesn’t know yet. I didn’t want to tell her over the phone, especially knowing that I’d just have to tell her again when I got here.

And then again every half hour, for God knows how long.

“To be honest, Gwen’s had a string of bad days lately,” Isabel says, like she’s steeling herself. “Her seizures have gotten a little more frequent, though they’re not worse. And her memory loss... well, it’s not improving.”

Fuck. I haven’t called my mom in two weeks, and even though I’ve got excuses, none of them are good enough. Fifteen minutes is all it takes, and then she’ll be happy for the next twenty that she remembers I called.

“Anything else I should know?” I ask grimly, outside my mom’s door.

“Just try to be patient,” Isabel says gently. “Anything you tell her, she won’t remember until you repeat it ten, maybe fifteen times.”

I stare the door, number 1168. I’m going to have to tell my mom her youngest child is dead ten, maybe fifteen times, and every time is going to be like the first for her.

I knock.

“Come in!” I hear my mom’s voice call. I look down at Isabel, who puts one hand on my arm and nods. I’m glad that there’s someone in this world who appreciates how hard what I’m about to do is, and I push the door open into my mom’s suite.

She’s sitting in a high-backed chair with floral upholstery, a delicate coffee table in front of her with a doily and a teacup sitting on top.

As soon as she sees me, she practically leaps to her feet, her hands twisting nervously in front of herself.

“Stan,” she says, her voice brittle with anxiety.

I stop in the doorway, suddenly nauseated even though this isn’t the first time this has happened. I know I look a lot like my dad, that we move the same way, that we have the same gestures, but it still nearly knocks me over.

“I’m Trent,” I tell her.

She exhales, her shoulders slumping, and peers at me, her whole body a picture of relief.

“Of course you are,” she says, walking toward me. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what got into me! What a pleasant surprise, dear.”

We hug. She asks me how the drive in was, isn’t it just hot as the dickens today, would I like some orange juice or maybe a diet coke. She’s still good at this kind of small talk, the things that don’t require specific knowledge, the conversations she can have by rote.

I take a glass of water, sit in a floral chair opposite hers, and I know I have to do it now or I might lose my nerve.

“Mom,” I say, as gently as I can. “Eli is dead.”

For one long, terrible second, my mom just stares at me, mouth open, eyes wide.

Then she just crumples. Her whole body slumps and collapses and she slides to the floor. I can’t stand in time to catch her, but in a moment, I’m kneeling next to her, arm around her shoulders, trying to hold her up.

I just gave her a seizure, I think. Fuck, I should have asked Isabel to come in with me, I didn’t think this would happen—

“Eli,” my mom gasps. “My God, Trent, not him. Not my baby. Not my baby.”

I know there’s nothing I can say, so I don’t, I just close my eyes and rest my cheek on the top of my mom’s head, letting her sob in my arms. I’ve seen my mom go through a lot of bad, bad shit, but I think this might be the worst.

This is one, I think.

We’re on the floor for a long, long time. She soaks through my shirt with tears, and I just sit there, rocking her back and forth, wishing I could do something or say something that would make it better, but I can’t.

After ten minutes, maybe more, she sniffles, looks up at me.

“Was he hit by a car?” she asks.

After he got out of prison the first time, Eli worked construction with a county road crew. I see what Isabel means about her memory, because she’s forgotten that Eli was behind bars again.

“He was killed,” I say, and explain, as gently as I can. She’s quiet the whole time, still crying softly. She gets the hiccups before I finish.

“Where did I go wrong?” she asks, when I’m done telling her what I know.

I don’t have answer for that either, and we go quiet again.

After a while, my mom sits up straight. She grabs a tissue, dries her eyes, and from the spark in her I can tell she’s starting to forget. That she still knows something bad happened, that I’m there for an ugly reason, but I don’t think she knows what it is any more.

She stands, clears the teacup from the table. I can tell she’s confused, that she knows she’s forgetting something, like why she’s crying, why I’m sitting on the floor, but too embarrassed to say anything.

So I sit again. She offers me tea and I accept, and we spend a few minutes chatting pleasantly. She asks me vague questions about my life and I answer. I ask her how her Thursday night salsa classes here are going, and she laughs, says she never was so popular in her younger days.

I wonder if she knows what I’m talking about.

She sits. We sip tea as the knot in my stomach tightens. I know the second time is coming like a freight train, barreling down the track toward me now.

“Speaking of which,” she says, taking a sip. “Have you talked to Eli lately?”

* * *

I have to tell my mom three more times, and when I leave Sunset Acres it isn’t even noon yet. I’m already wrung out and exhausted, because telling my mom once was pretty bad. Watching her find out Eil was dead over and over again? That was fucking next-level.

It’s unbelievably hot. Even the breeze is hot in a way that feels like the sun is breathing on me, and it’s got that unmistakable scent of home: dust and farming and the pollution from Los Angeles that settles here, mixed with asphalt and tires and concrete.

I go to the prison first, half an hour north, and sign the release for Eli’s body in person so the funeral home can pick it up later that day. They ask if I want to see him, but I don’t. I want to remember my little brother alive, not stabbed to death and in a drawer in cold storage.

Then the funeral home. They’ve got a thousand questions for me and an obsequious, too-gentle manner that makes me feel like I’m being treated with kid gloves. I fucking hate it, and in the end I tell them to do whatever it takes to have a funeral as soon as possible, I don’t care how much it costs.

The cemetery, where the caretaker insists on taking me for a fucking walk to view all the different parts of the graveyard, even though they all look pretty much the same: headstones everywhere, dead people below. The grass is pale green and just beginning to go summer-brittle, and I know that in another month it’ll be brown and like walking across spikes, no matter how much they water it.

It’s evening when I finally get back to my hotel room at the Holiday Inn and lie on my bed without even taking off my shoes, the exhaustion and stress finally catching up to me, even as my brain buzzes over lists of everything I have left to do.

And then, inevitably, inescapably, there she is. All day I’ve been seeing Darcy’s face, the way she looked when I told her she had a black hole for a heart. I’ve been trying not to think of it, trying to focus on all the shit that needs to get done, but it hasn’t worked.

I took the best thing in my life and I fucked it up. And then I didn’t even tell her I was leaving.

I had time to apologize. Even if I did it in five minutes before I’d left, it would be better than this gnawing heartbreak on top of the hole that’s been punched through the middle of me. For fuck’s sake, I could call her right now.

I don’t. I lie on the bed and feel fucking awful and don’t call her to apologize, and it’s because I’m fucking afraid.

I’m afraid she won’t forgive me. I’m afraid she’s angry, that she’s hurt, that she’s decided again that this is a bad idea.

I’m afraid that Darcy’s going to break my heart the day before my little brother’s funeral, and I don’t think I can take it. I can take a whole lot of shit, but not that.