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“Wow,” MacKenzie says, tossing her fork aside and finally giving up on her salad. “I don’t know where you find sand deep enough to bury your head.”

My temper, which had been warming, reaches my voice. “What the hell is that supposed to—”

“A lot of bad things happen in Markham County, Lydia,” MacKenzie says, leaning in across the table to stare me down.

“They just don’t happen to us.”

Twelve

I spend the evening emptying the linen closet and taking down all the shelves, then stapling the soundproofing material on all four walls, the ceiling, and the back of the door. My movements grow more muffled as I work, the black acoustic foam triangles soaking up everything. Dad has to knock twice before I hear him.

“Sorry,” I say when I pop open the door, but he shakes his head.

“Don’t be, I’m glad to hear this stuff works,” he says, peering around me to get a look.

“Bad dad joke, bad dad!” I tell him, shaking my finger in his face as if he were a misbehaving puppy. “What’s for dinner?”

“Your mom abandoned us,” he says. “So I’m thinking—”

“Not sushi,” I tell him. “I won’t eat raw seafood in a landlocked state.”

“We’ve got Lake Erie,” Dad says, crossing his arms and waiting for my rebuttal.

“Catch me a tuna out of Lake Erie, and then we’ll talk,” I counter.

“Point taken,” he concedes. “Pizza?”

“There we go.” Both of my parents operate on the assumption that the other one is judging their parenting, which means that I can get junk food out of Mom when Dad isn’t around, and carbs and fried food out of Dad when Mom checks out for the night with her friends.

Thirty minutes later we’re camped out with our individual greasy boxes around the fire in the backyard—all the easier to toss our incriminating trash in when we’re done.

“Looks like the closet is shaping up nicely,” Dad says, wadding up his napkin and throwing it into the flames. It dances briefly, then disintegrates into ash. “When’s your next episode?”

“Sooner rather than later, but I’m stalling,” I admit. “I’ve been trying to think of a way to make the Civil War monument more interesting, and I landed on the idea of tying each soldier to a family alive today.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Dad muses. “We don’t exactly get fresh influxes of new faces that often in Henley.”

“No,” I agree, pulling out my phone to check my notes. “I only found a few last names I hadn’t heard of—Mattix, Dovecoat, and Fender.”

“Can’t say I know those, either,” Dad agrees, twirling the long neck of his beer so that the flames dance across the glass bottle.

“Right, so I thought about taking it the opposite direction,” I say.

“Meaning?”

“Today at the cemetery it was like nobody really cared. I mean, I’m a geek about this stuff and even I wasn’t all that interested,” I confess. “But I got to thinking about the monument, how we replaced the old one with a new one, bought pavers to commemorate those that donated money for it, and how maybe someday we’ll be worried about preserving those stones. It all feels kind of futile.”

“‘Time and tide wait for no man,’” Dad quotes. “Or woman, mind you.” He tilts the bottle toward me. “But what do you mean about taking it the opposite direction?”

“What if I focused on Mattix, Dovecoat, and Fender?” I ask. “Three family names that aren’t here anymore. These men could have been only sons, or childless men. They died, and that’s why their names are gone. The Civil War monument is about honoring the dead, but all the living want to do is see their own names in stone. Mattix, Dovecoat, and Fender are really, truly dead. Shouldn’t we care about them the most, instead of the least?”

“I see what you’re getting at, and you’re not wrong,” Dad says, still twirling his bottle, his eyes following the play of the flames. “But isn’t that a little dark? And you’re right—the living do care about their ancestors, or at least, their own last names. What if somebody gets offended?”

“Um, remember that whole thing about me taking the gloves off?” I ask, tossing my pizza box into the fire. “I’m not using the measuring stick by which all things are judged in Henley—what if somebody’s feelings get hurt? Everyone knew Benson was a drunk, and people don’t want to talk about it. So we pretend like it didn’t happen, just like all the shit that goes down in Trash Park.”

“Lydia!” Dad snaps. “You weren’t raised to talk that way.”

“No, I was raised to be nice and pretend like everyone else is, too.”