Why we bother.

Why we’re here.

Why we love.

I had a family, and they were everything to me, and I didn’t even know it when I had them. I had a girl, and she was everything to me, and I knew it every second I had her.

I lost them all. Everything a guy could ever want.

I found my way home again, but don’t be fooled. Nothing’s the same as before. I’m not sure I’d want it to be.

Either way, I’m still one of the luckiest guys around.

I’m not a church kind of a person, not when it comes to praying. To be honest, for me it never gets much past hoping. But I know this, and I want to say it. And I really hope someone will listen.

There is a point. I don’t know what it is, but everything I’ve had, and everything I’ve lost, and everything I felt—it meant something.

Maybe there isn’t a meaning to life. Maybe there’s only a meaning to living.

That’s what I’ve learned. That’s what I’m going to be doing from now on.

Living.

And loving, sappy as it sounds.

Lena Duchannes. Her name rhymes with rain.

I’m not falling anymore. That’s what L says, and she’s right.

I guess you could say I’m flying.

We both are.

And I’m pretty sure somewhere up there in the real blue sky and carpenter bee greatness, Amma’s flying, too.

We all are, depending on how you look at it. Flying or falling, it’s up to us.

Because the sky isn’t really made of blue paint, and there aren’t just two kinds of people in this world, the stupid and the stuck. We only think there are. Don’t waste your time with either—with anything. It’s not worth it.

You can ask my mom, if it’s the right kind of starry night. The kind with two Caster moons and a Northern and a Southern Star.

At least I know I can.

I get up in the night and make my way across the creaking floorboards. They feel astonishingly real, and there isn’t a moment I think I’m dreaming. In the kitchen, I take an armful of spotless glasses out of the cupboard that hangs over the counter.

One by one, I set them on the table in a row.

Empty except for moonlight.

The refrigerator light is so bright, it surprises me. On the bottom shelf, tucked behind a rotting head of unchopped cabbage, I find it.

Chocolate milk.

Just as I suspected.

I might not have wanted it anymore, and I might not have been here to drink it, but I knew there was no way Amma had stopped buying it.

I rip open the cardboard and fold out the spout—something I could do in my sleep, which is practically the state I’m in. I couldn’t make Uncle Abner a pie if my life depended on it, and I don’t even know where Amma keeps the recipe for Tunnel of Fudge.

But this I know.

One by one, I fill the glasses.

One for Aunt Prue, who saw everything without blinking.

One for Twyla, who gave up everything without hesitating.

One for my mom, who let me go not once but twice.

One for Amma, who took her place with the Greats so I could take mine in Gatlin again.

A glass of chocolate milk doesn’t seem like enough, but it isn’t really the milk, and we all know that—all of us here, anyway.

Because the moonlight shimmers in the empty wooden chairs around me, and I know, as always, that I am not alone.

I’m never alone.

I push the last glass through the patch of moonlight across the scarred kitchen table. The light flutters like the twinkling of a Sheer’s eye.

“Drink up,” I say, but it’s not what I mean.

Especially not to Amma and my mom.

I love you, and I always will.

I need you, and I keep you with me.

The good and the bad, the sugar and the salt, the kicks and the kisses—what’s come before and what will come after, you and me—

We are all mixed up in this together, under one warm piecrust.

Everything about me remembers everything about you.

Then I take a fifth glass down from the shelf, the last of our clean glasses. I fill it to the brim with milk, so close that I have to slurp the top to keep it from overflowing.

Lena laughs at the way I always fill my cup as full as it can go. I feel her smiling in her sleep.

I raise my glass to the moon and drink it myself.

Life has never tasted sweeter.