Page 121 of Happiness for Beginners

By the time the hole was deep enough, one of my hair buns had come unpinned and my strappy heels were broken and smeared with mud. Duncan kneeled to set the little package of our friend into the hole, and while he backfilled the dirt, I kicked off my broken shoes and ran up to my room to grab the daisy chain that Windy had made me. I laid it over the grave. We said a few words of parting, and Duncan put his arm around my shoulders as we made our way back up to the house.

It wasn’t until we were back in the kitchen that I realized Duncan had a six-pack of beers in his other hand. He set it on the counter and then pulled a can out to offer it to me.

But then it hit me: “Tell me that six-pack wasn’t in the cooler, too,” I said.

He froze with his fingers on the pop-top. “What?”

“Nope.” I pointed at the door. “Take it outside.”

“A day like this, and I can’t have a beer?”

“Not one covered in dead dog juice,” I said, turning to the sink to scrub the mud off my hands.

“She was in a Hefty bag.”

“Outside!” I ordered, in my bossiest big-sis voice. “Now!”

Duncan obeyed.

When he came back in, I said, “You can have a beer at the bar mitzvah.”

“What bar mitzvah?” he asked.

I turned to look at him. “You can’t walk in here with my mummified dog and still expect me to go to my high school boyfriend’s love-child’s bar mitzvah by myself!”

He shook his head in submission. “No.”

“Go find something to wear,” I said.

Duncan started toward his room. “What do you wear when you’re crashing a bar mitzvah?”

“Something nice!” I shouted. “With a tie!” Then I lifted a bare, muddy foot into the sink to wash that off, too.

Once I was cleaned up, I had to wash off all my smeary makeup, put an ice pack over my puffy face for a few minutes, and start over. My dress had a few flicks of mud, but it was still passable. My heels, I threw in the trash, and so I wound up in a pair of red ballet flats. I had just repinned my bun and redrawn my eyeliner when Duncan came into my room. He’d scrounged up a skinny black tie, the black tux pants he’d worn at my wedding (now two inches too short), and a white oxford that had been part of his school uniform. He looked like a waiter, but I said, “You look very handsome.”

Had I ever said anything that nice to him before? He seemed to blink in surprise. “Thank you,” he said, “and right back atcha. You look like a piece of candy.”

I turned toward the mirror, and glared at my puffy, splotchy face. “Actually,” I said, “I look so terrible right now, I’m thinking about ditching.”

“You can’t ditch,” Duncan said. “If you ditch now, they’ll think you chickened out.”

Jake had said the same thing.

“They’ll think you never recovered from high school.”

“Are you saying I have to go?”

Duncan gave a shrug, like,Pretty much. “You may feel terrible,” he said, “but you don’t look terrible. How you can dig a grave one minute and look so great the next, I’ll never know.”

That got me. The sweetness of it made me laugh.

“What?” Duncan asked.

I stood up, ready to go. “Come here,” I said, and I put my arms around him for our second hug that day—and also that decade. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

He hugged me back, stiffly. “I thought you’d hate me forever after you knew about Pickle.”

I didn’t hate him. If anything, it was the opposite. Which was weird. A month ago, I would have pummeled him senseless over all this. A month ago, I would have held up this dog-in-the-Hefty-bag situation as definitive proof that I had a useless, hopeless, terminally irritating little brother that I would never be able to relate to, or care about, or like. But a month can be a long time. Before, what I saw were all the ways Duncan keptfailing. But now, at last, I knew too much about him—and even, in fact, too much about myself—to think of him so obtusely. What I saw now were all the ways he wastrying. And I could so relate to that. It made all the difference.

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