My parents were fighting (they were always fighting), so they once again farmed me out to my grandparents. It was summer time and I was miles away from home and from my friends.

He hoisted the gasoline canister out from the old pickup truck and we walked towards the warehouse. It weighed heavy in his hand, liquid splashing like a sea wave with every step he took. I looked at the side of his face, the stubble of his beard, and watched breath rise from his soft lips. In the dark there were so many things to say, but I didn’t say any of them. We got to the door and I fished for the keys. One padlock, one entry code, and one stubborn handle. He stepped through and I tightly closed the door behind us.

I spent more time with you than my own mother. You gave me my first lesson in pastry making.

It was a lot of work to prepare for a Trece party, thought Marci as she and her mother waited for the makeup lady. I can’t imagine a wedding, she thought. For over the past few months she’d had dress fitting, food and cake tastings. There had been decorations and flowers to decide on. When you thought about it, Trece was as important, if not more so, than a marriage. There was generally no surgery required for a wedding. 

The gap between us was growing, though nothing, ostensibly, had changed. While no one made mention of what had happened, the unreciprocated feelings were becoming a burden on the group. Nothing was said, but Bianca was deferential, and she liked to be around Earl less and less.

Then Earl disappeared. 

After my senior year, my parents died in a summer car accident, and the funeral was hot. At eighteen, I was the youngest of my brothers. David was twenty-eight and lived in L.A. with his wife and kids. He was a tax attorney and the executor of the estate. Michael was twenty-five and living in Ann Arbor, finishing his M.S. in Biochemistry. He was getting ready to apply for med school. They knew I had no plans and made no effort to make any for me. The service was short, and my parents were buried side by side, thirty feet from a pine at the north end of Sojourn Memorial Cemetery.