"Shall we go in?" Casper asked.

I dug my heels into the mud along the edge of his house. "Why? I don't need to go in, I just need to talk to the neighbors."

"It might take a while to question the whole neighborhood, you should put on more sunscreen."

Well, look at this piece of shit. I know when I need to put on more sunscreen.

And, indeed, it would have been a good idea to put some on before starting the rounds.

"I'm going in because I need to pee. Don't get any weird ideas."

Cas made that sighing sound that accompanied his eye rolls. "Whatever you say. Meanwhile, I'll prepare something to eat for you."

He approached the back door and pulled out the keys.

"You don't need to prepare anything. I'll be out of here in five minutes."

"Could you not be so difficult for half a second? I know you haven't had breakfast. And coffee isn't breakfast."

Who cares... I didn't even try to dissuade him, he was as stubborn as a brick. And besides, if I had an excuse to stay at Coyote's house for a while, I could take a look around to find the letter.

It would be exponentially easier to find the sender knowing what the hell was written in the message. And the fact that Cas didn't want me to read it made me morbidly curious.

The lock clicked, making the door creak on its hinges. The door itself was the usual junk held together by plywood and wishful thinking, but the lock sounded different from what I remembered.

As I crossed the threshold, I ran my hand over it. There were four large bolts on the side of the door. A reinforced lock? Has little Casper become a security nut? And can he afford to spend eighty dollars on a single lock?

My mind came up with a thousand possible imaginings of how he had come by that money.

It wasn't something I wanted to dwell on. It wasn't my business. He could have robbed a bank, for all I cared.

The door closed, leaving the hallway in semi-darkness and muffling Christopher Walker's barking.

With his hefty soles, Casper outpaced me, making a racket with every step. I heard the blinds of the living room-kitchen scraping, and saw the line of light from that room dimming.

He was adjusting the brightness of the house so that I wouldn't have to wear sunglasses indoors. It was horrible how familiar that routine was to me.

I dashed into the tiny bathroom and closed the door behind me. There was no danger of the light bothering me there, the only window was a small opaque cubicle of twenty by twenty centimeters, overlooking the house across the street.

The bathroom conditions were what you would expect when the house is taken care of by a nineteen-year-old biker gang leader. The toilet looked decent, thank God, but that sink had seen a bit too much toothpaste spit and not enough disinfectant. Then there was the pile of dirty clothes mixing with the greenish mold on the wall, and the vaguely rusty and always running washing machine banging from side to side in its cubicle as if trying to break free from the chains of its pipes.

I balanced the backpack on one leg as I pulled out my travel sunscreen. I quickly applied it to my arms, hands, face, and neck, then put the bottle back in the backpack and tiptoed out of the bathroom.

From the hallway, I could hear Cas rummaging in the kitchen. His room was right across from the bathroom, so I didn't risk him seeing me.

I left the safety of the hallway to delicately pad into his room. The blinds there hadn't been lowered, so the light from the window slightly distorted the shadows, but the view was still good enough for me to notice that something was off.

No Ducati poster hung on the wall. No stack of black jackets and jeans on the wicker chair under the window.

Those changes could be simply the result of time passing, it had been a long time since I set foot in there, but... there was no smell of him. In its place was a faint scent of cheap deodorant.

That absence struck me as if I had walked into McDonald's and been hit by the smell of fresh fish. I forgot my mission for a moment. I just felt the need to bring that place back to my memories of it.

I nudged the wicker chair towards the wardrobe and climbed on it, trying not to break it further.

On top of the wardrobe was a 1990s encyclopedia. It had always been there for as long as I knew Cas. I was sure he had never read a single syllable of those pages, but I knew he considered it his little treasure trove.

I grabbed the first volume, feeling the embossed letters of the cover: Numismatics and Archaeology.

I opened the first page, our photo was still there.

I couldn't make out much, but I had a copy of that same photo, I had seen it with the screen magnifier. I recognized my white hair and the dark mass that was Cas's hoodie. I knew I was smiling in that picture, that Cas had his arm around my neck.

My mother had taken it on my twelfth birthday. Casper had given me a pair of red sneakers, the ones I had been glued to the storefront for two hours drooling over like a boxer.

At twelve I didn't wonder how the guy who couldn't afford to fix the water heater could buy me a pair of four-hundred-dollar shoes. I only figured it out the following year, when he showed up at the party with an iPhone wrapped up, but without a box.

"The letter isn't there."

I jumped so hard I made a dent in the chair and tripped over it. Cas rushed to the wardrobe and straightened me out before I could kiss the floor with my teeth.

"Don't ruin the picture!" He snatched it from my hand, making sure of its safety more than mine. "You crumpled it!"

"If you hadn't scared me to death, I wouldn't have squeezed it!"

"If you hadn't poked your nose around, I wouldn't have scared you to death."

"If you'd give me that damn letter, there wouldn't be a need-" Cas stopped balancing me, and I let out a slightly embarrassing yelp when I realized I was in free fall. I hit the ground rather ungracefully, but Cas grabbed me by the shirt before I could completely ruin the floor.

I straightened up and shook off his hand, not that it was necessary, he had already let me go. He was getting back on the chair and putting the photo back in place.

"What happened to your room? Where's all your stuff?"

Cas landed with the grace of a bull. "It's not my room anymore. I gave it to Carli. If I had let her keep sleeping in bed with Mom, they would have strangled each other a long time ago."

It was Carli's room? I looked around for some trace that a girl slept in there. There was nothing. No posters, no clothes and shoes strewn around. No school books.

"But... what about you? You won't be sleeping in bed with your mom?"

I got a smack on the back of my head, which was Cas's way of letting me know he had just given me a dirty look. "I sleep on the couch, idiot."

"Meaning you bought a real couch, and somehow altered the structure of space to fit it in your miniature living room?"

That bastard turned his back on me and left the room, ignoring my exit.

He couldn't be serious. He didn't really sleep on that couch, did he? I quickly followed him into the hallway and then into the living room-kitchen, but I stopped short of actually entering.

The couch was still that couch, a faded red with two cushions, losing stuffing from every patch. But that wasn't what stopped me.

Sitting on the couch was Casper's mother. Even from behind, I recognized her, she was thin as a skeleton, with the same black hair as her son. She was facing the old boxy TV propped up for years by those wooden crates used to sell fruit. But the TV seemed off. I was pretty sure the TV was off.

Cas had headed to the kitchen corner without mentioning that anomaly and started fussing at the counter. I tried to look at him for instructions, but got nothing.

"Good morning, Esther." I tried a neutral approach. Casper's mother had never particularly liked me, but then again, she didn't seem to like anyone. "Uhm... How are you?"

"Don't waste your breath," Casper said, busy chopping something on the cutting board. "She won't answer you."

Not only had she not answered, she hadn't even turned around. Was she already stoned? It wasn't even nine in the morning.

I entered the living room and circled the couch to look her in the face. With the blinds lowered, the light was optimal, and I could see her semi-open mouth, eyes fixed on the TV's off screen, and a spent cigarette between her fingers.

"She has a cigarette!" I exclaimed alarmed, but Cas didn't even stop chopping.

"She can't do anything. I took away all the lighters. And she can't light the stove anymore."

She can't...?

I looked back at the woman and found her in the exact same position, same lost expression.

"What happened?"

"She had a stroke," Casper replied, as if discussing the weather. "Three months ago. The doctors told us to be prepared, that she only had a few days left. We were already about to hang the balloons. But then they sent her back here. Can you believe it? What a rip-off. Anyway. She shouldn't hold on much longer."

I approached the kitchen counter and grabbed the edge. Cas didn't stop chopping. He didn't look up at me.

I was used to hearing him joke about his mother kicking the bucket, but this was different, this was real.

"Cas..." I grabbed his arm. Softly at first, but when he insisted on not stopping chopping, I tightened my grip. He stopped. He looked up at me. "You should have told me."

"You weren't exactly in the mood for a chat three months ago."

No. It was true. Three months ago, the Coyotes had trashed a pub on Litz Avenue. Everyone knew it was them, but the folks in the Pit don't go to the cops to file complaints.

Cas and I had fought. We fought bad.

Forget it. It's not the time.

"I'm in the mood for a chat now."

"There's nothing to say." He shook free from my grip and started chopping again. "It's already a lot that she made it to this age, with all the shit she takes. And then look, I can do this." He picked up a piece of what he was chopping (something orange) and snapped his hand towards his mother.

I heard a slight thud, so I imagined that whatever was thrown landed dutifully on Esther's head.

Turning back to Casper, I found him smiling, that half-smile of his that I never knew how to read.

I leaned on the counter and leaned towards him. "We used to do this before too, though."

Casper burst out laughing. He was always like that. He could laugh in the face of any misfortune. Growing up with a mother who was too wasted to keep her head and eyes open from morning till night wasn't something everyone would know how to laugh about.

"Don't worry about her. It's just a matter of days now. Here, take this." Something cold touched my hand, and I found myself grabbing the cup without even trying to see what he was offering me.

"It's fruit salad. And here..." he tapped a nail on the glass of a cup, so I immediately spotted the brownish liquid, "there's a protein shake."

"Ew, you can keep that."

"It wouldn't hurt you to put on a few grams of muscle." He continued to buzz with his bullshit about physical activity and nutritional supplements, but I stopped listening.

My eyes were still fixed on Esther, motionless as if she were already dead. But there was something else that troubled me... a detail that I had just caught and that had escaped me.

Oh, right. The shake. The blender I had given him had been broken for ages. I had gotten it for him because I knew he wanted one, and also because I knew that, being the good toxic male he was, he was ashamed to admit that he liked cooking. Two birds with one stone. I could make him happy and torment him with the same gift.

But then that thing had broken, and we had broken up again.

But now he had a new blender. I glanced at the kitchen counter, trying not to linger too much on anything. The oven handle was different, longer, taking up the entire door.

He even bought a new oven? So not only did he have the money to pay bills, food, his mother's medical expenses, maintenance and fuel for the motorcycle... he also had the money to redo the kitchen and change the locks?