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Flame to the end, I take a slow, deep inhale, like I watched on the video.

Instead of the controlled, easy exhale, it’s a jagged, fire-filled, hack.

“There,” I say, between coughs, holding the lit joint out to her. “And stop using your expiration date to bully me into things.”

She laughs, struggling to pinch her fingers around the joint.

“I’ll hold it.” I lift it to her mouth.

She takes a short, gentle inhale, followed by a cough, waving her hand through the smoke in front of her.

“How do we know if it’s working?” she asks.

“We get bronchitis,” I deadpan.

“The guy on your phone said we need to take a few hits.” She ignores me, looking at the joint in my hand. “Maybe we need to smoke the whole thing or something?”

I don’t know enough about it, nor do I have it in me to argue with her.

“Fine.”

I take another drag, which stings like poison ivy being shoved down my throat, before holding it up to her lips again.

“What will you do when Mandy comes back?” she asks through her next cough.

I nearly drop the joint from shock and my jaw goes slack at the mention of Bo’s wife.

“Well?” she demands, voice stern.

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.” My vagueI don’t want to talk about thisresponse isn’t good enough because she raises her eyebrows at me, letting me know wearetalking about it. “I guess I would let him figure it out. She is Lucy’s mom. His wife. I’m nothing, not really.” My mind wanders to everything we’ve done and how opposite of nothing it really feels. I know he lovesme; I believe him every time he says it, but I don’t know if he loves me because he does or because Mandy isn’t here.

“And if you get cancer?” she asks while I take another drag.

My eyebrows pinch through my next smoke-filled cough. “Where is this coming from?”

“What are you going to do with Bo if you get cancer?” she repeats, this time punctuating each word.

In the skunk-scented haze, I’m quiet. Thinking. Imagining the likely scenario that I have a million times: me getting cancer. Dying. But now, there’s Bo. And Lucy. And hopefully Huck.

“I’d let him be there with me until I couldn’t,” I say. When I pause, she nods, just slightly. “Like you, I wouldn’t want him to see me at the worst—any of them. If he was with me, I’d figure out a way to go, I think. To force him to remember me differently.”

I expect to see a look of understanding on her face, but instead it’s something else. Annoyance, almost.

“You’d die alone?”

I scoff. “Aren’t you?” When I raise my eyebrows it earns me a withering glare that pulls a laugh out of me.

She huffs—frustrated—and waves her hand in the air, as if dismissing my words. “Well don’t take all day, Birdie,” she snaps. “Let me try smoking this thing again and see if I get it right this time.”

I shake my head in disbelief, like we weren’t just having the strangest conversation, and once again lift the joint to her lips.

Veda and I, two women who have never smoked pot, smoke nearly an entire joint while sitting in her sunroom pottery studio at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

I know we don’t smoke an entire joint, because when Bo finds us, sitting in smoke and repeatedly asking each other if the other feels anything, he takes the remainder of the joint out of my hand, dumbfounded.

“Are you two high?” he asks, eyes wide.

“No!” I say, lying. I know I’m stoned. My teeth and fingertips tingle like they’ve fallen asleep while my eyelids cut through my line of sight.