Again Croce was selling sadness, but what we wanted was cruelty. One day at the end of summer, a week before I was to leave for California, I sat alone on the porch with my crush-neighbor Heather. I had recently turned 11 and I felt like a triumphant veteran. It was Croce, telling me that I was about to lose everything and that nothing could be retrieved. Everything I ever knew was slipping through my fingers.
Divorce is nobody's fault.
Plane crashes happen. Anger, cruelty, and morbidity are all just different forms of sadness, and in the end you just have to grieve until you're done, whenever that is. We all started to cry. The sweat on our brows dropped and mixed with the tears on our cheeks, and together the droplets fell onto the condensation on the adults' cold cans of beer. That water ran off each porch in little salty rivulets, which met the neighbors' rivulets until a stream formed and met other streams among puddles of coolant on the asphalt.