Halloween with the class from hell. My very first year of third grade, and I had four students show up wearing questionable costumes.

First, and least, was Jacob. He had a black suit (presumably from a recent wedding or funeral), a pair of sunglasses, and disturbingly realistic plastic handgun. He was an assassin. I made him keep the gun in his backpack, which he claimed ruined his costume.

I tapped the GPS incessantly but no map came up on the screen. Ray had warned me to get it fixed. “Hell, just buy a new one down at Costco,” he’d said. But somehow the task was always tumbling out of my priorities. My fuel gauge arrow was hovering just above empty, and I knew there’d be nothing but a two-lane country road for the next twenty miles. I pulled my cell out of my purse and turned it on. No service.

I went to sleep that night pondering the choker necklace at Darby’s throat, how it amplified the tendons and veins in her neck whenever she turned her head. Also how the ends of her chin-length hair curled slightly outward, like a row of commas. Would I see her tomorrow? I hoped I would see her tomorrow.

On the day of her burial, she had no regrets. She did not regret buying lottery tickets so that she could have lived in a fancy house or traveled to Bora Bora each winter. She did not regret having no children. She’d never been able to imagine tiny beings made of herself.