Just before the wake starts, Patrick sends word that he can’t come. He’s feeling pugly, he says.

Pugly. This is code for Patrick thinking he’s too ugly to be in polite company. It’s the word we use between ourselves. Patrick isn’t just shy, it’s that he has a disfigurement, you see—a scarred face and a jaw displacement. He was once in a fire when his kitchen exploded due to a gas leak, and in one instant he went from being relatively handsome and well-adjusted, he said, to being a hideous beast. His word for himself, not mine, because the light that shines out from Patrick’s eyes transforms his face. You see that light, and you don’t even know about his jaw and his skin, which is stretched so tight in places that it’s almost translucent. His light makes you forget all that.

But that’s how he describes himself, as a hideous beast because he is the only one who can’t see that light, and periodically I have to go down to Patrick’s apartment, which he keeps dark and musty smelling, and also it’s filled with old computers and one grouchy cat, and I sit down there with him and try to tell him about the light that other people see in him and also that he has a soul that anyone would love.

He breaks my heart, Patrick does. He promised he would come to the Blix Out.

“I’m going down to see him,” I tell Houndy and Lola, and they exchange a look, but nobody tries to stop me. I put on my long spangled skirt, and Lola helps me zip it up over Cassandra, and then I put on the purple tunic and the shawl that has the lace and the mirrors sewn everywhere, even on the fringe. Lola fluffs up my hair, which is sticking up everywhere—and off I go, trundling down the stairs, down to Patrick’s lair.

“I can’t do it today, Blix,” he calls from the other side of the door when I knock.

“Sweetie, I need you to come to my wake,” I say. “Just open the door a little crack. I have something I need to tell you.”

After a while, I hear about five locks being unlatched, and then he lets me into the apartment, and I go tromping around, and I open all the shades and turn on lights. He’s standing there in the darkness, wearing what he always tells me is his work uniform: baggy sweatpants and sweatshirt, way too big. He’s a thin, waifish guy now, somebody who would barely leave a shadow, and that’s what he intends, I think, to waste away until he’s just a smear in the world, as small as a piece of gum you’d see on the sidewalk. He can’t be loved anymore, he told me once, so now he doesn’t want to bother anybody. He has some horrible job, writing about diseases and symptoms, and so he’s steeped in troubles and doesn’t want to bother the people of the world with his yawning, gaping need. I get this, I do.

“Patrick,” I say. “Honey.”

“I can’t do it. Listen, I love you and I think it’s fantastic that you’re doing this amazing party—”

“It’s not just an amazing party, as you call it. It’s a wake. An Irish wake.”

“Whatever it is, but you don’t want me there having a panic attack. I’d ruin the whole mood.”

“We’ll stick together. We can do our dance, and then you won’t need to panic.” One time, when it was just the two of us, we made up a dance in which we wore hats that we pulled down until they nearly covered our faces, and then we threw them up in the air. We might have been drunk when we invented that dance, but we could be drunk again, I tell him. I pick his Hawaiian shirt out of his closet, which contains exactly three shirts, all meticulously hung up and evenly spaced.

“You look devastating in this shirt, and you know you do. So you can put on that and your straw hat, and we’ll dance and drink. People need you there. If you’re not there, I’ll have to answer the question all night long: Where is Patrick? Where’s Patrick? Think of how that’s going to be for me. It’s going to ruin my whole evening having to explain your absence.”

He just keeps looking at me sadly and shaking his head.

“Patrick,” I say. “Honey. We can’t undo the scars and the burns. We can’t go back to that day, so we just have to figure out how to move forward from it.”

I go over and gently touch his face, touch the place on his cheek that is nearly sunken in, and the smooth, bright part near his eye where the skin was stretched taut. I take his hand and hold on to it.

He is silent, unmoving, while I do this. A praying mantis of a man.

“Can’t we find a way together to be in the world in spite of the fire?”

He tilts his head back and closes his eyes. And I take his hand, and very carefully, slowly, drag it over to Cassandra, where she is resting beneath my shirt, and I lift my shirt ever so gently, and place his hand on this ball of tumor that even Houndy doesn’t want to look at or touch. I wrap his hand around Cassandra, and I tell him her name. I am terrified that he will pull away, that he’ll recoil, that I’ll see the horror in his eyes before he turns away.

Instead, what flickers across his face is compassion. He doesn’t move his hand. He says, “Oh, Blix,” like a slow exhale.

“We are all broken,” I say to him. “And we all still have to dance.”

He sucks his breath in. “I scare children, for God’s sake.”

“And yet we still have to dance.”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Also. I didn’t want to have to bring out the big guns here, but I think this really is a wake. I think tonight is the night I’m going to die.”

“Damn it, Blix. What are you talking about?”

“I have some evidence I’m not going to go into. But I’m just saying you might want to come and hang out. Otherwise, I’ll have to haunt you for the rest of time.”

And then I kiss him and kiss him, kiss all the scarred-over parts of his face, kiss his eyelids and his forehead, and then I go back upstairs, and I am not surprised—not a bit surprised—when an hour later he shows up to the party, and we slow dance together, him in his Hawaiian shirt and sweatpants and me in my spangles and sequins, with Cassandra bouncing around like a baby in a pouch.

The tiki torches by then are bright flames against the dark night sky, and people are gathered around the fire pit, where Houndy is cooking the lobsters he and Harry somehow got from the sea today. Jessica comes out with pots of melted butter, and Sammy, recently returned from his visit to his father, is playing his guitar in the corner. There are clusters of people everywhere, people playing music and people just talking, and oh, so many people, and Lola is bobbing here and there, putting out platters of things, pouring more wine. There’s a keg in the corner, and Harry is pumping it like it’s a musical instrument.

I am twirling around in the middle of everything—very slowly, very gently—and I am smiling when it happens. Smiling, as if life is just going to continue in this iridescent way, and I will always be a body, and Houndy will always have a body, and we have time for so many more wakes before the very end comes.

But no. There’s a sudden commotion next to the fire pit, and at first I think too many people are trying to put too much wood on it. But no—somebody is down on the ground, and others are gathered around, and somebody says, “Quick! Call nine one one!”

Lola turns to find me, and when our eyes meet, I know the very worst has happened. “Houndy,” she mouths to me.

And it’s true. I push through the crowds, and there he is. My Houndy.

Lying on the ground on his back and he is not breathing, and by the time I get there he is already dead, but no one knows that yet, only I know it because I see his spirit leaving, and I can see his face growing more gray, the pink of him vanishing like a magician’s trick, and somebody pushes me aside and does CPR on him—for the second time, I’m told—and Houndy is gone from his body, but part of him is still there with me. I feel him leaving, feel him slipping away, but first he’s drifting around telling me he loves me, and then soon he’s small enough that he can fit in the folds of my shawl, where I will hold on to him forever.

People are all murmuring, the crowd is like a tide, bending and waving, and gathering and subsiding. There are hands on me, people trying to lead me away from him, and good luck to them, because I can’t be led anywhere. And then there is the sound of a siren, and the pounding of boots on the roof, as EMTs come and do their work, bending over him, coaxing him into coming back, trying to use their machines to persuade him. But he’s in my shawl, I want to tell them. He’s not where they can reach him, not really.

Lola leads me away, but I insist on going in the ambulance. It’s too hard, she says, but I am firm about this. I need to go. And she says she’ll come, too, in that case. We have to be there with Houndy, even though it’s not Houndy. Not anymore.

Houndy/not Houndy.

I pass everyone on the way down, take hold of their hands, look deep in their eyes, and see all the love reflected back. All the amazing, smashing love. The universe of stars. The dance of summer.