After the Marcy closes, we slip through the basement window and head back to the janitor’s office. For our last night here, Johnny wants to play board games. “Like normal kids do,” he says. The other day, he found a box filled with games like Don’t Spill the Beans, Monopoly, Operation, and The Partridge Family Game. Clue is also among the stash, but we will not play it because, as you might imagine, Mother and Father, we are in no mood for Professor Plum bludgeoning Mr. Boddy in the billiard room with a candlestick.

Johnny reads the rules for Operation. Using tweezers, the players must act as surgeons and remove comical body parts—Adam’s apple, funny bone, charley horse, spare ribs, broken heart—from a chap named Cavity Sam. In Sam’s brain is a plastic ice-cream cone, alluding to brain freeze, the pain that people feel when they eat ice cream too fast.

“There is no such thing as brain damage in heaven, so Czar’s brain is sure to heal fully,” I tell Johnny. “Did you know certain townies have lost fingers and toes and their digits have completely grown back? Like the limbs of salamanders.”

Johnny looks up from the instructions. “Don’t you hack off one of your baby toes to see how long it takes to grow back,” he warns.

I must admit the idea has crossed my mind.

“Czar will recover and we will accept our punishment,” I continue. “Thelma will help us so we are treated fairly. We may have to clean toilets for months on end, but so be it.” Maybe, as a result, I will learn more about the true nature of Town’s plumbing system.

“We should apologize to Czar,” I say. “It was a case of mistaken identity, like in the Hardy Boys novel The Missing Chums” (another book found in our hideout).

“Please, Boo, let’s not talk about that guy tonight,” Johnny mutters without looking up from the instructions. “What an idiotic game,” he then says, throwing the instructions aside.

Instead of Operation, we play Monopoly. Johnny is the terrier; I am the wheelbarrow. Rover scampers across the board like a third game piece. At one point, Johnny holds up a Get Out of Jail Free card. Drawn on it is a cartoon fellow dressed in prison stripes. “I should hang on to this,” Johnny says with a smirk.

He talks very little. He looks sad and confused even when he buys Boardwalk. We are both tired, too bushed to focus on buying railroads, hotels, and utilities, so we do not finish the game. We decide to go to bed.

Johnny puts Rover in its camper, but without the lid on so the roach can roam around at night if it wishes.

Before bed, I bathe in the big sink: I soap my hair and pour a pail of water over my head. I dry off on the lobster towel. It is my turn to sleep on the couch, but I offer it to Johnny, claiming I prefer the throw pillows on the floor. I fear that his nightmares may revisit him tonight. He might sleep more restfully on the couch.

After we turn off the lights, Johnny says, “Know any lullabies, Boo?”

I do not have Thelma’s voice, but I take a shot at the Cole Porter standard “Friendship,” a song that states that, in the closest friendships, people combine their individual qualities and strengths to form a “blendship.” I recall that you sometimes sang this song as a duo, Mother and Father, to entertain patrons at Clippers. I sing a slower, more melancholy version than you did. In the dark, my voice sounds more tuneful and, dare I say, more angelic than I remember it from before my passing. Perhaps to offset a lower intelligence quotient, Zig tweaked my singing voice.

When I finish singing, Johnny says sleepily, “Blendship?”

“It’s a portmanteau,” I say.

“A poor man’s toe?”

“No, a portmanteau. It means a word that combines two different words. In this case, the two are ‘blend’ and ‘friendship.’ In French, portmanteau actually means a coatrack, but in English, it also refers to a kind of suitcase with two—”

“Boo.”

“Yes, Johnny?”

“Please shut up.”