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“We’re just friends,” I say.

She takes a slow sip of her drink. “Too bad.”

“Dottie.”

“I’m only saying.” She sets the mug down. “A woman who can sit through an entire service getting adopted by your son and still smile on her way out the door? I’d have kept her.”

I decide the safest move is to change the subject before she starts naming grandchildren.

“I’ve got a busy week,” I say, steering us toward anything else. “On tomorrow, off Tuesday and Wednesday, back on Thursday.”

Dottie nods along, mapping my shifts onto Bo’s days the way she always does.

“That’s fine,” she says. “I’ll be here Thursday. I’ll just miss bingo.”

She says it lightly. Like it’s nothing. Like she’s mentioning the weather.

But I catch it.

Thursday is bingo. Ruth. Carol. Fran. A whole table of widows who’ve turned Thursday night into something loud and a little competitive and entirely their own at the assisted living center.

She’d never say it, but I know she’d rather be there.

I also know why she isn’t.

For two years now, she’s talked about moving into the assisted living center. Her friends are already there, holding a seat at their table like a promise.

And she keeps turning it down.

Because of us. Because Bo needs someone on the days I’m on shift, and someone to make lunch, and someone who remembers he likes his sandwiches cut in triangles and not squares. Because I asked her to move in when everything fell apart, and she said yes without a second’s hesitation, and she has never once let me see it cost her anything.

But it costs her something.

It costs her occasional Thursday nights, for one.

“You don’t have to miss bingo,” I say. “I can figure out Thursday.”

“Maybe one day a beautiful young woman can take over.” She winks.

Bedtime is its own weather system.

Bo has a system, and we do not break the system.

He brushes his teeth. Slides into his slippers. Tucks in each stuffed animal along the end of the bed, all of them, in order, then lies on top of the sheet and waits while I lay the same three blankets over him.

It has to be these three, in this order, and they can’t touch his neck.

For a long time I thought the system was him being stubborn. It’s not. The system is how he makes a loud world quiet enough to sleep in.

He was eight when we finally got the word for it.

Autism.

If I’m honest, the diagnosis itself wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the eight years in front of it, the behavior everybody had a theory about, the specialists and endless doctor appointments, the meltdowns no one could explain, three different therapists, the medication, the sleep studies.

And then one psychiatrist asked a handful of simple questions, watched him for an afternoon, and gave us what eight years of specialists hadn’t.

He has autism.