Mrs. Fried walks in wearing all black and carrying a shoebox, and I’m so shocked at the sight of her that I start looking around the room to distract myself. Stressing about what Dom has done to our hotel room is somehow easier than taking in Mrs. Fried’s unwashed hair and shaking hands.

Basically Dom covered the bedroom mirror with a bunch of towels and put a t-shirt over the one in the bathroom “just in case.” He’d read somewhere that Jewish people do that when someone dies. I didn’t know much about it, but I figured he was bastardizing some tradition, and tried to coax him out of it by telling him he was being totally weird and embarrassing, which, per usual, did nothing to stop him.

“It’s called sitting Shiva,” he told me. “That’s what Mrs. Fried be doing at her house and I feel like it’s only respectful that we recognize her family’s traditions.”

“Just because she’s sitting Shiva doesn’t mean she has to take Shiva with her everywhere,” I begged.

“Oh, Chompers—just simmer, okay?” Dom smiled sadly at me and went back to futzing with the mirror. Dom has lots of names for me. Pickle, Chompers, Cactus. Sometimes if he’s trying to be funny he’ll call me Pimple or Chocolate Butt, which is only okay because I’m acne free and thin. Not to brag. I mean, things aren’t so great that I’ve ever gotten asked to a dance or anything.

“Well at least don’t use my bra to cover up the corner like that,” I mumbled.

“Maybe don’t leave your bras all over the floor,” he said, and used a sock instead.

Anyway it doesn’t matter, because Mrs. Fried doesn’t notice any of it. Her eyes are so bruised and burnt from crying it looks like she’s been hit in the face with a baseball bat.

“Dominic Bushman,” she says, nodding at Dom. Ruth used to tell me her parents thought it was strange how when we were little everyone else was calling their parents Mommy and Daddy, and I had Dommy. I guess people think it’s weird how I call him by his first name, but it’s not like we’re progressive or anything; like everyone else in Friendship, Dom’s a true conservative. He says it’d be stupid to be from Wisconsin, needing oil the way we do in winter, and not vote Republican. When it gets below zero around Christmas, Dom will go out and start my car a half hour before I actually leave for school, just so that it’s warm when I get in it. According to Dom, Republicans are just trying to stay warm.

“Hiya, Nita Fried,” Dom says. “Welcome, welcome.”

Mrs. Fried makes a spitting sound. “On the way over here I probably saw a dozen bleeding bucks strapped to the roofs of cars. I hate hunting season.” She puts down the shoebox on one of the double beds, and seeing her without anything in her hands makes me want to crawl between her arms, fill up the empty space—not just because I feel bad for her, but because other than the bloodshot eyes and matted hair, she looks exactly the same as she did when Ruth was alive, and that makes me want to hold onto something.

I take a step toward her. “I hate hunting season, too.”

“Please don’t touch me,” she says in a crackly, flat voice, like she can read my mind, and plops down on the bed beside the shoebox. “I’m so tired of hugging people, I could self-immolate.” She glares at me. “That means set myself on fire. All day the neighbors have been bringing meatloaves. I hate meatloaf.”

“Okay,” Dom and I say in unison.

“I’m so sorry.” She covers her face with her fingers. “I’m not myself. Could you get me a candy bar or something from the vending machine?” She sighs, drops her hands into her lap and looks at Dom with tears in her eyes.

“Of course.” Dom pats his pockets for his wallet. “Whatever you need.”

As the shuts the door behind him, she turns to me. Her face looks like it weighs a hundred pounds. I can feel mine getting hot.

“Hi,” I say.

She gestures to the shoebox. “I brought this for you. Take it.” I walk over and pluck it from the bed. Inside are some pictures that Ruth and I were going to use to make a collage: us at eight years old, wearing boxers on our heads and crawling through her backyard on our elbows like soldiers. The two of us at the third grade Halloween parade: Ruth as a princess and me as an “animal on TV,” wearing cat ears and a cardboard television on my head with a square cut for the face.

“I can’t have these,” Mrs. Fried says blankly. I notice she can’t look at me, either. Does she wish it had been me on my way to her house Friday night, instead of the other way around? She seems mad at me. Should I apologize for being alive?

Everyone grieves differently, I remind myself. Dom’s only told me that a bazillion times.

I pick up a photo of Ruth and me with our arms around each other, smiling so big that you can see the matching rubber bands on our braces—green and gold, Green Bay Packers colors. We didn’t even follow football. We were just trying to fit in with the boys at school.

I catch myself accidentally bending the photo, I’m gripping it so hard. When Mom died, Dom and I hid all the pictures of her for almost a year, not because we couldn’t stand to look at them, but because we were afraid to destroy them. The urge was to hold on too tightly—accidentally crumple every photo in our fists because we wanted to absorb the image. I put the pictures back into the shoebox and replace the lid.

“How is the eulogy coming?” Mrs. Fried asks quietly, reaching into her gigantic purse.

“Oh, you know. Fine.” I squat down next to my suitcase and dig through the underwear and socks, tucking the shoebox securely into one of the corners.

She sighs. “There’s something else.” I hear her rustling in her bag and turn to see her tugging out a notebook. “It’s Ruth’s journal. I thought—I don’t know—I thought there might be something sweet in there you could quote at the service.” She bends over and slides it across the carpet. “I can’t handle it right now.”

“Okay.” I pull it toward me. “Thank you.” Quoting from it is a good idea. It’s all I have to go with, at the very least. I turn the notebook over in my hands. “I didn’t know Ruth kept a diary.”

She stands and clears her throat, smoothing her shirt against her belly. “I’d like to read it eventually, her journal, I’m just not ready right now. Not to mention her handwriting.” She takes a step toward me. “Kippy, it’s not just about the eulogy. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything.” My heart is pounding. I get up off the floor.

“I need you to censor it for me.” She licks her lips, which are so dry I can hear her tongue slide across them, and takes another step toward me. “I thought maybe you could make it so that when I’m ready, none of it will…offend me.” She grabs me by the elbows so that my arms are stuck at my sides.

“Mrs. Fried?” I can feel her cold, bony fingers through the fabric of my t-shirt. Her breath smells like fish.

She stares at me with those bloodshot eyes, glancing around nervously like Dom might walk in—and then leans into my hair and whispers, “I need you to redact the sex parts.”