2

IN THE BEDROOM that Ralph grew up in, there’s a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. There are chips of paint where he’d replaced posters of superheroes with posters of bands and beautiful women, all gone now, rolled up and bundled together and leaning in one of the house’s many closets and crannies.

When we first moved in, we talked about peeling up the stars, softening the corners with vinegar, scraping them up with the edge of an old credit card. We use something similar at the Northern Star Seniors’ Complex, where I work, to free medical tape from the natural cling of formless flesh, a special tool that only works half as well as a credit card would. We staff commonly complain about all the special tools we don’t need but have to use, mock the imaginary men in suits testing things on overripe peaches and unfloured dough, and maybe they’ve got lots of money in their pockets, but we know that they’re morons who have no idea what they’re talking about.

Ralph and I also talked a lot about when we’d be moving out:right away, as soon as possible, the minute she’s well again. Because even though he’d been strong when we’d moved in, strong enoughto move in—equipped with resources he’d downloaded from a website called the Borderline Parent, and a swear-on-your-life promise from me that I could handle this temporary uprooting—being near her stirred rotten, dangerous things inside him. And this house too, where her health and happiness had been his sole responsibility, where she’d only showed affection when he was sad, only gave attention to his tragedies; it soon began to feel again as though that were all that mattered.

But Ralph was quick and good about consulting his coping materials, practicing his mindfulness, deep breathing, and calming visualizations, reminding himself that he was a whole and separate person from her with a whole and separate life, and that he could love her and support her without turning to dust.

And now she’s dead. And the house, though ours, feels as rotten and dangerous as the things she triggered in Ralph. Crumbling tendons of tightly wound wires in the walls, some living, most dead. Sodden cupboards and feathery centipedes and malignant fissures in the foundation. Never loyal, never good, built to indenture servitude to a monstrous brick idol, poorly ventilated, belching effluent into the water supply, weakening resistance with flats of free gin.

Ralph is still asleep: even breathing, steady as a metronome, not even a flinch as I slide, limb by limb from the bed.

I pull my copy ofSecrets of a Famous Chef from his beaten old bookshelf. My favorite and only cookbook. It’s from the year 1930, and everyone you see who’s covered in wrinkles and hunched over walkers and lipping bits of soup from a spoon ate stuff from that book and I want us both to be old like that.

I ease the door shut behind me and stand in the hallway, arms crossed over the book against my chest, confronted by Ralph’s mother’s closed bedroom door. She could still be sleeping in there. The