Left with no one — not Zy, not Andy, not Zy’s mother or sister —to represent their loss, the boys understood their next decision meant something. They didn’t know what to do. They knew they needed to stay together. Eventually, they went back to a familiar booth, placed the familiar orders. They ate waffles and hash browns and remembered their friend.

PHOTO COURTESY OF JASMINE VILLARREAL

Two days later, we learned the family would have a reception at their house. It turned out that Zy and his mother had recently discussed untimely deaths, and funerals, and Zy had described how he wanted to be remembered. It involved camping and a bonfire and food and storytelling, but it began with a viewing. With Zy, or Zy’s body, in his bedroom. My wife said, “I can’t go.” She isn’t squeamish, but she’s opposed to viewings of the dead. I’m no fan of them myself, but understand the impulse — not only to see the lost once more, but to confirm that he’s gone, that the body remaining is not the person we knew. Lying in his casket, my father looked so bloated, so unlike how we had known him, that my usually-reserved mother complained until the funeral director had the body wheeled into the backroom and adjusted. When the body was returned, and he asked my mother if it looked better — if they had better approximated what she wanted to see when she looked at her dead husband’s face — she said something polite, but was no more satisfied. What was truly wrong could not be fixed.

My wife’s sympathy was stronger than her repulsion. We took a plant, a card. Futile gestures. To get to the house we had to drive the road Zy had been killed on, pass the spot where he had seen a car begin to pull out, swerved, returned to his lane, and been hit. There was no cross, no marker. He had been close to home.

The wrecked motorcycle lay at the end of the driveway. We didn’t know his family well, didn’t recognize the other people at the house. Zy’s mother was keeping vigil by the body; his father greeted us and launched into a monologue that took strange turns. “Zy had a lot of adventures. He had a lot of girls, too — and I didn’t think he had any. That’s something I learned in the last day or two.” He smiled. “A lot of adventures. But we were counting on a lot more.” He began to weep, then stopped. “But this is a happy time. Like that time the kids had that run-in with the cops. That was fun, a lot of fun.” My wife and I wanted to express our sorrow, to offer comfort, but the battle he fought was internal, his logic twisted by grief.

Downstairs, the hallway was dark, the door closed. Something soft blocked the bottom of the door — to keep the air from getting out. Inside, candles illuminated trophies from childhood sports, walls covered with pictures of motorcycles, a giant ad proclaiming “Performance, Power, and Precision,” and a poster with a line from a song Jimi Hendrix said described a dream: “Scuse me while I kiss the sky.” A fan blew across the body. Zy lay in bed with his eyes closed, his mouth open awkwardly, the lump under the covers implying folded hands.

The day before, Ben and Ian and Michael had come over to our house. They let themselves in, as they had hundreds of times before. They scratched our dog behind her ears, checked the kitchen counter to see what there was to eat, and then they headed downstairs, where together the four of them finished taking apart our son’s boyhood bed.