GUS

I THOUGHT WHEN the moving van showed up Mom might panic, but it’s Tam who spends the whole morning finding excuses to blow her nose in the bathroom.

I need another surgery. Those pesky muscles in my upper arm have started pulling my right shoulder forward, and they threaten to slowly twist my spine. Maybe it has to do with Garth yanking on my arm, or maybe it doesn’t. Dr. Petani referred me to a specialist who thinks an operation will help me stand taller in the future.

She was more upset than I was. “Sometimes these things happen after a growth spurt. You should stop growing up so quickly, Gus.”

“Thanks, Dr. Petani, but I’m good.”

We’re moving into an apartment near Hardwick General, a hospital that specializes in orthopedic surgeries. The doctor there is super young and super enthusiastic. It’s hard to be excited about meeting people who can’t wait to cut you up. But people don’t always come across the right way when you first meet them. If I’m going to be seeing this guy for six months of rehab, I want to like him.

“If anyone will like a sadist,” Phil reassures me, rolling for initiative, “it’s you. I imagine you’re more cowed by the prospect of attending a new school full of oglers and necks of rubber.”

“It’ll be okay,” I say, and I think it mostly will be. After marching down the street with all the eyes of Samsboro on me, it’s hard to care about a few more strangers’ stares. “And we’re going to move back for senior year.”

“Yes, you’ll be fine. Even without your Mercutio.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. “You’ll be fine, too.”

“Obviously.”

It’s my last afternoon in Samsboro, and we’re playing a short campaign in his basement. Phil’s cleric attacks the warg who bit me during my last turn. He rolls a fifteen and adds a plus-five modifier, soundly wounding our foe.

There’s nothing but packets of paper and dice on the table between us, but it feels like so much more than that.

“Phil. I’ll call you constantly.”

“Oh, please not constantly. I may be preoccupied.” He’s jotting notes on his character sheet. “I’m going to attend therapy that doesn’t involve my own father. ‘Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature.’ ”

I want to tell him that’s great. I shove the popcorn bowl his way.

After we move, we’ll be three hours from Samsboro. Once the trial begins, Mom’s going to have a long commute on her hands. But I’m going to join her on that commute whenever I can.

“It’s your roll,” Phil says.

I want to tell Phil how much I’ll miss him. Instead, I roll the dice and attack, finishing off that goblin.

Kalyn’s family hosts a farewell barbecue. Mom seems nostalgic as we approach, commenting on the rusted Spence Salvage sign. “That was here even back when I was a kid, Tam.”

Mom’s still anxious about being outside, but she’s started writing thought pieces. When Grandpa stopped paying for my health care, Mom wrote an article about his years of abuse and blackmail. People started a fund-raiser. My surgery might not cost us a penny. It’s a surreal, scary, happy, guilty thought.

A couple days after her kitchen confession, I sat down across from Mom while she was working and waited for her to look at me.

“Can I ask you about s-something?”

“Anything, Gus. From now on, anything.”

“I want to know about Claire.”

So Mom told me. She told me about their first secret date, when they rode to Tittabawassee Creek and went fishing, even though neither of them knew the first thing about it. Claire sometimes bit not her fingernails but the skin around them, and thought it was a sign of her future schizophrenia. Claire could be sarcastic about even the most serious things, but sincere about the silliest. Claire adored “those hideous Precious Moments statues. She had no taste, but she loved me. I had no integrity, but I loved her.”

I said, “When we get to the new place, we could hang a picture of her, too.”

It’s a rollicking ride down the Spence driveway, but not nearly as rollicking as that moment. I wasn’t sure if Mom was going to sob or hold me. She did both.

When we reach the bedraggled prefab, Kalyn’s waiting with two baseball bats in her hands. She gets up from her perch on the ramp Tamara installed and holds them up over her head like rabbit ears.

“WonderGus,” she says, “wanna take part in a Spence tradition?”

“That’s not your best idea ever, sweetie,” Mrs. Spence calls from behind the grill. Tamara hands her a plate of tofu. Mrs. Spence cackles before dipping the entire block in barbecue sauce and slapping it down alongside the sausages. Grandma Spence, sunk into her chair beside the picnic table, makes a tittering noise.

“Oh, but it is a lot of fun,” Mom says. “If you’ve got helmets?”

Kalyn pulls two welding masks from a lawn chair behind her.

“You can come, too, Beth! Got another bat in the shed somewhere. Apparently we hoard baseball bats as well as DNA evidence.”

Mom laughs, something that seems no less amazing for happening more these days. “Oh, no. I’m going to hang back and reminisce.”

Kalyn and I beat the life out of a busted windshield, watching the glass pearl and bounce away. Phil would enjoy this more than I do, especially with my arm acting up. But we give it our all, in oven mitts and long sleeves.

It’s only after we’re done that I recognize the car we’ve wrecked is a Taurus.

“What?” she says. “I’ve still got angry feelings, you know.”

I kick the hubcap. “Yeah, me too.”

Dad’s a loss I’ll always feel, but like my arm and leg and Kalyn and my family, that loss is part of me. Dad didn’t die for any good reason. I’m sorry about what happened to him, and sorry I’ll never know him. But who knows who I would have been if I hadn’t lived my whole life without him. I wouldn’t know Kalyn. I wouldn’t be me.

It would be another great tragedy.

So I can’t really be entirely sorry.