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for the meeting of the historical preservation society. Sprocket sat, leaning against my leg, his fur golden in the raking light. I took in a deep lungful of air, briny and sharp. I’m not sure how long we would have stood there staring if a big black SUV hadn’t roared up Marina Road, making both Sprocket and me jump.
    â€œWhoever that was was in a hurry,” I observed as we turned and started walking toward home.
    Sprocket harrumphed in response.
    I lived in the granny flat over the garage of the house I grew up in. If this sounded pathetic, there was a reason. It was pathetic. When I left Antoine and moved back to Grand Lake, I hadn’t wanted to take any of Antoine’s money. Ihadn’t wanted anything of Antoine’s at all. Not even a wooden spoon. I still didn’t. He occasionally sent me checks anyway, which I then ripped up into little tiny pieces and sent back to him. At any rate, I didn’t exactly have a lot of cash to spend and what I did have needed to go into POPS. Haley had been using the rooms above the garage for storage. She offered them to me rent-free. She felt a little guilty about living in the two-story Craftsman bungalow we’d grown up in for all these years. She shouldn’t have. I couldn’t wait to get out of it when I left Grand Lake at eighteen and I really didn’t want to move back into it now. Somehow the granny flat seemed different enough from moving back into the room I had as a child to only be a small plate of pathetic and not an entire entrée of loserdom. Not that I would have been able to have that room even if I had wanted it.
    My room was now Evan’s room. The very Evan who was driving his Big Wheel in a wild figure-eight pattern around a toy fire truck and a stack of blocks in the driveway as Sprocket and I walked up. He paused for a second to give a tip of the batting helmet he was wearing to us, then took off again as fast as he could, Batman cape sailing behind him. He was also wearing galoshes. He was three and about the most glorious three-year-old on the planet. I was his aunt and I was completely unbiased on the topic.
    I cut across the lawn and sat down on the front steps to the wide front porch next to Haley, who was shucking peas into a bowl balanced precariously on the very tips of her knees, pushed there by her very pregnant belly. I leaned against her and she slipped an arm around me. “You okay, Bec?”
    â€œNot so much, Leelee. Not so much.” Sprocket sat down on the lower step and laid his head in my lap. It was the first time all day that I felt completely warm.
    â€œDan told me,” she said into my hair as she kissed the top of my head.
    That was good. At least I didn’t have to explain anything to her. I didn’t trust myself to say some of the words out loud without crying, and I was afraid if I started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
    â€œDo you want to talk about it?” she asked.
    I straightened up and stretched. “Not yet.” Maybe not ever. Tears pricked at the back of my eyes as I thought about talking about Coco being gone and the hole it would leave in my life.
    â€œI’m here if you change your mind.” Haley smiled at me. She is two years older than me and we spent our whole lives being “the girls” until our parents died. We were like a unit. Then Mom and Dad had the bad luck of having a tire blow out on Interstate 80 when they were next to a semi. In an instant, we were no longer “the girls.” Haley became the grown-up and I became one of the more rebellious teenagers Grand Lake had ever seen.
    Sitting next to each other now, the significance of that two-year age difference had pretty much disappeared. We were both tall and thin like our mom. We had both inherited our father’s dirty-blond curly hair. Our chins were a little too sharp. Our shoulders were a little too narrow. Otherwise, we weren’t bad. Not movie star material,