“Are we alone?” he asked.
“Yes. Of course we’re alone.” I set the wooden spoon down. “Did you and Ben have a fight?”
“No.” He shook his head hard. “Please don’t call him.”
That frightened me more than his tears.
You have to understand who Ben was to us. Luke and Ben had been inseparable since the first week of first grade, when a teacher sat them next to each other because their last names were close in the alphabet and they were the only two boys who refused to take off their rain boots. By the end of that week, they had traded lunches, invented a secret handshake, and announced to both mothers that they were going to live together forever in a treehouse.
They never built the treehouse. But they did nearly everything else together. Soccer. Science fairs. Camping trips. Their first summer jobs at the same grocery store. Ben had his own toothbrush in our bathroom and his own drawer in our hallway closet. When Luke got his wisdom teeth out, it was Ben who sat on the end of the couch feeding him pudding and making him laugh until he begged him to stop.
And people had been calling them twins for years. Same height. Same dark, unruly hair. Same lanky build and same habit of shoving their hands into their back pockets when they were nervous. Teachers mixed them up. Cashiers asked whether they were brothers. Strangers at the soccer field would smile at me and ask, “Are your boys twins?”
