‘Wha?’ Cole asked his mother, faking innocence, unapologetically sucking whipped cream from his finger.

Giggling, Caleb copied his older brother. ‘Yuh – wha?’ Then, for some inexplicable reason, he glanced around the table, popped his sticky finger from his mouth, and lisped, ‘Where’s Wose?’ Everyone froze, and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Where’s Wose?’ he wailed, as though he’d just figured out that when your parents tell you someone has gone to heaven, that person is never, ever coming back.

All the food in my traitorous stomach surged up at once. I leaped from my chair and ran to the guest bathroom, the memory of that night condemning me. The sounds I would never forget. The futile screams I’d shouted until I could do no more than rasp her name, until the tears stopped because I literally couldn’t produce them. The useless son I’d been when she needed me.

I puked up everything I’d eaten, gagging on sobs when nothing was left in my stomach.

A month later, Dad quit his job, sold our house and moved us to the Gulf Coast – to my grandfather’s house – the last place he’d ever intended to live again.

LUCAS

I had dinner with the Hellers once a week or so – whenever Charles barbecued or Cindy made a huge pan of lasagne. The Hellers always tried to make me feel like I belonged to them, like I was one of them. I could pretend, for the space of one or two hours, that I was their son, their big brother.

Then I returned to reality, where I had no connection to anyone, except a man who lived hundreds of miles away and couldn’t look me in the eye because I was a reminder of the night he lost the only person he ever loved.

I knew how to cook, but I’d never moved beyond a basic range of meals, most of which I’d learned from my grandfather. He’d been a simple man with simple tastes, and for a time, I’d wanted nothing more than to be like him.

During meals with the Hellers, I steeled myself for the inevitable semi-veiled queries, especially from Cindy – lines of subtle interrogation her daughter had recently taken up. I wondered if Carlie had been deployed last month to find out if I was secretly g*y or just perpetually girlfriendless. She was her mother’s daughter – interfering where she believed she was needed, and often too uncomfortably close to target.

I couldn’t be upset with either of them for trying to draw me out, but there was usually little, if anything, to tell. I went to school and I worked. Sometimes, I went downtown to hear a local band play. I attended monthly Tau Beta Pi meetings. I studied and worked some more.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up Jackie Wallace, Charles’s student – and mine – who’d progressed from capturing my attention during class to stealing into my conscious and unconscious fantasies.

This morning, my alarm began blaring in the middle of a dream about her. A vivid, detailed, solidly unethical dream.

She had no idea who I was, but that fact didn’t stop my mind from imagining that she did. It didn’t stop the sweeping disappointment when I woke fully and remembered what was real – and what wasn’t.

Purposefully arriving late to econ, I slid into my seat, pulled out my programming text and forced myself to read (and reread and reread) a section about transfer functions so I couldn’t watch her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear or stroke her fingers across her thigh in a measurable rhythm that progressively drove me crazy.

Definitely nothing going on in my life that would make it to dinnertime conversation.

I arrived to find that I wasn’t on the agenda, which was all good until I knew why. Carlie, who’d always been a wisp of a girl despite her hearty appetite, sat poking at her food with her fork and eating almost nothing. Cindy always made a small, separate dish of meatless lasagne in deference to her daughter’s refusal to eat ‘anything with a face’. It was Carlie’s favourite meal, but she wasn’t eating.

A worried glance passed between her parents, and I wondered what the hell was going on.

‘How did volleyball practice go, Carlie? Any more talk of moving up to varsity?’ Heller asked in an everything is normal voice.

Carlie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m done,’ she said, shoving halfheartedly at her barely touched dinner and rushing away. Her bedroom door slammed shut, but the thin lumber couldn’t block the sound of her sobs.

‘I’d like to kick that punk’s ass,’ her father growled.

Caleb’s eyes widened. He was constantly encouraged not to say ass.

‘I understand the sentiment, believe me, but what would that solve?’ Cindy set her plate on the granite counter and turned towards the staircase leading to her daughter’s room.

‘It would make me feel a damn sight better,’ Heller muttered.

Carlie’s pitiful wails grew louder when Cindy opened the door upstairs, and all three of us winced.

‘A breakup?’ I guessed. Obviously, this wasn’t about volleyball. I hadn’t even known she was dating anyone, unless – ‘The homecoming guy?’

He nodded. ‘Ditched her for one of her friends, no less. Two-for-one heartbreak.’

That smug little ass**le. I’d only met him once – when he’d arrived to pick Carlie up for the dance. Sliding an orchid on to her wrist and posing for pics, he’d seemed cocky next to her wide-eyed artlessness, inevitably reminding me of Kennedy Moore … which made me think of Jackie Wallace. Dammit.

‘Brutal,’ Caleb observed, his mouth full of noodles. ‘I’ll help with the ass kicking, Dad. We can give him a two-for-one ball breaking.’

Heller harrumphed. ‘Don’t let your mother hear you say that, or we’ll both get our asses kicked.’ His words admonished gently, but he offered a closed fist in solidarity, and Caleb snickered and bumped it.

I’d always defined jealousy as coveting what someone else has. Like me, wanting Kennedy Moore’s girlfriend. There was only one of her. If she was mine, she wouldn’t be his.

So I didn’t know what to call how it felt to watch Charles with his sons, or with Carlie. A form of jealousy, I guess. But they all shared him as a father, and they shared their mother, too. If I’d been born a Heller kid, none of them would have lost a parent for it.

They’d never begrudged me my relationship with their parents, and I was more grateful for that than I could express. Yet as often as we all pretended I was part of their family, Cindy wasn’t my mother, and Charles wasn’t my father. Neither of them could take the place of what I no longer had, as much as they strove to fill those empty spaces.